Brad Mehldau 'Live in Tokyo'

As Mr. Mehldau's trio has tightened, his solo piano performances have broadened, slowed down, become more dramatic. On the solo concert issued as "Live in Tokyo," his 11th album and first on Nonesuch, he plays tunes familiar to anyone who has seen his trio a few times in the last decade: Thelonious Monk's "Monk's Dream," Nick Drake's "River Man," Radiohead's "Paranoid Android." But everything here, including an imperious "Someone to Watch Over Me," has much greater weight.

At his best Mr. Mehldau plays with time: not through contrivances of meter, but through a bilevel rhythmic feeling, in which the basic pulse of a song remains stately and the ornament on top freely accelerates and slows down. He is also an odd combination of trance inducer and straightforward song player. In "Monk's Dream" he works up to hammered chords and clashing harmonies at gathering volume, getting close to Cecil Taylor's language. But he never wants to get too far from the governing tune, and he tends to lodge his boldest experiments sometimes a little too neatly inside the well-outlined middle section of each song. He is a deep improviser, but easy to follow.
[NY Times]