Live in Tokyo
Brad MehldauLPA
- Intro
- 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
- My Heart Stood Still
LPB
- Roses Blue
- Intro II
- Someone to Watch Over Me
LPC
- Things Behind the Sun
- C Tune
- Waltz Tune
LPD
- From This Moment On
- Alfie
- Monk's Dream
- From This Moment On
LPE
- Paranoid Android
LPF
- How Long Has This Been Going On
- River Man
Brad Mehldau's Nonesuch Records debut album, Live in Tokyo, first released on September 14, 2004, will make its vinyl debut almost exactly fifteen years later, on September 13, 2019. The vinyl edition, made in partnership with Run Out Groove, comprises the original album's eight tracks plus an additional seven tracks previously available only on the Japanese edition and sequenced in the order of that release. (See below for complete track list.) This triple-LP set was mastered by Alex DeTurk and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Record Industry in the Netherlands. Limited to 3,000 copies worldwide.
On Live in Tokyo, Mehldau, hailed by the Washington Post as "one of his generation’s most gifted and thoughtful pianists," performs his own tunes and interprets material from artists as varied as George Gershwin, Thelonius Monk, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Nick Drake, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Burt Bacharach, and Radiohead on an album recorded live in concert at Sumida Triphony Hall in Tokyo in February of 2003. (Mehldau is Japan on tour with his Trio now, performing at Hyogo Performing Arts Center in Nishinomiya tonight and at three venues in Tokyo in the coming days: Suntory Hall on Friday, International Forum Hall C on Saturday, and Yomiuri Otemachi Hall on Monday.
"Few pianists can match Brad Mehldau when it comes to cross-fertilizing jazz, classical, and rock," said JazzTimes. "The same applies for technique, taste and intellectual curiosity. All of those qualities are on display [on Live in Tokyo]."
"Mehldau plays beautifully on his own, his work is florid with detail, yet never just flowery," said All About Jazz. "There is a deeply felt passion in all he plays, and that's exactly why he is so engrossing to hear: in a solo setting Mehldau demonstrates how he selects his ideas altogether discriminatingly from what must be a veritable flood of variations that occur to him as he plays. It's not long into listening to Live in Tokyo that you are reminded how skillfully he runs the gamut of emotion in his playing."
Brad Mehldau's latest album, Finding Gabriel, released earlier this month on Nonesuch Records, features performances by him on piano, synthesizers, percussion, Fender Rhodes, and vocals, with guest musicians including Ambrose Akinmusire, Sara Caswell, Kurt Elling, Joel Frahm, Mark Guiliana, Gabriel Kahane, and Becca Stevens, among others. The Times of London says “the dominant mood is of a master musician having fun” on this latest album from "the American jazz pianist, one of the best alive." The AP calls it "a soundtrack for our times."