Brad Mehldau: Anything Goes : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Pianist Brad Mehldau, a thirty-three-year-old Floridian, has helped refresh jazz by including the music of his generation, touching on everyone from Nick Drake to Radiohead. On Anything Goes, more traditional fare dominates; the performances are dreamily ingratiating and a touch conservative. Mehldau's intensely lyrical style melds with his longtime rhythm section, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy, to create melodic momentum on standards by Cole Porter ("Anything Goes"), Alan Lerner ("I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face") and Hoagy Carmichael's "Nearness of You," as well as some unabashed showboating on Thelonious Monk's "Skippy." More intriguing is when Mehldau's trio finds the turbulence within Paul Simon's sentimental "Still Crazy After All These Years" and burrows into the anxiety of Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place." Ushered in by Grenadier's bass solo, Mehldau chisels away at the song's forbidding surface and then dances with Rossy's drums until he finds a way out. The trio's chops are impeccable, but they're only great when their sense of adventure is tested.

GREG KOT
(RS 943, March 4, 2004)