Live

I began with Largo and have not stopped... 2 CD's of scary chops and all of it LIVE !

This new Releases of Brads is awesome. It blows you away. Its 1 of the finest live recordings of all time. Awesome musicianship,awesome arrangements & very talented artist. Id go out as quick as you can & buy this Cd its that awesome.

Mehldau, Grenadier, Ballard during a week at the Vanguard when everything was working. The trio is driving in these live recordings. Jeff Ballard may have taken a season to integrate with longtime collaborators Mehldau and Grenadier. Their style is more direct/forward. When the improvisation moves toward the free/dissonant, Mehldau's playing evolves into compelling/catchy original passages. Complicated but direct; cerebral but grounded. I'm not likely to dance to it, but it demands a physical reaction.

Sensational on every level-- Rhythms, melodies, sounds

Great, I like this new release of Brad Melhdau Trio. He is going to be one of the great jazzman!!! I strongly recommend the CD.

I'm a huge Mehldau fan. I own all of his recordings as a leader and many of him as a sideman and have seen him live a few times. This is the trio's sixth live album (though the "Art of the Trio" title seems to have died with Mehldau's switch from Warner Bros. to Nonesuch). One of the real defining features of Mehldau's trio albums is that his playing consistently excellent (remarkably so!) througout. He seems to fall away from that a bit here as he tries a few new things. He does a lot of playing on the lowest notes of the piano in a few songs. To me these moments seem less spirited and a bit harder on the ear than most of Mehldau's earlier playing. Mehldau also plays a lot more ruminatively in some songs than he typically does. His playing sounds tentative in these moments, almost as if he is thinking too hard about what notes to play before he plays them. Finally, there are spots in a few songs where the band simply seems to lose its direction. There is a particularly long section of this in Mehldau's cover of "Black Hole Sun," but it occurs in other tunes as well. In a few of these moments, Mehldau seems to want to play back and forth with bassist Larry Grenadier, but the music ends up sounding more disconnected than it should. If anything, Grenadier keeps up his end of these exchanges better than Mehldau does (and his bass is mixed pretty loudly, which I enjoy). Despite those occasional negatives, there is a lot to like here. Mehldau's tune "Secret Beach" is among the best he has recorded with his trio, and the compositions written by Mehldau himself tend to be the best on the album ("Fit Cat" and "B-Flat Waltz" are also quite good). It simply seems he is a bit too concerned with testing the limits of the form in his playing of standards (if recent pop songs like "Wonderwall" and "Black Hole Sun" can be considered standards). Overall, I would recommend this to fans of Mehldau. If you are new to the trio, I would recommend buying The Art of the Trio Vol. 2 or Vol 5 (also a double cd) first.