Nonesuch
2006
House On Hill
About This Album
House on Hill may be a new recording, but the material is not. Virtually everything here was written, according to his liner notes -- like Keith Jarrett, Brad Mehldau writes about himself best -- in a session done in 2004 which yielded 18 songs with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy. The decision was made to split the sets into originals and covers. The covers became 2004's Anything Goes. There are nine cuts here, the remaining seven from 2004, and the other two come from a more recent session. Mehldau states quite frankly that the compositions here mostly fall into the standard frame for small ensembles: theme (head) variations/theme. Mehldau's notes are exhaustive. They look at compositional forms of theme and its variations from Bach and Brahms. Yeah, it's an intellectual (read: eggheaded) -- and occasionally dry -- reading. The music on this set is anything but. The sheer elegance of Mehldau's writing is always something to behold, and this trio always finds the lace of swing. Often it is not in the melodies and lyric lines he writes. These are usually somewhat knotty, expansive statements from which the band just finds a kind of groove to extrapolate upon. The title cut is a fine example where the slippery little notation in the theme is built into a Latin-flavored ride.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5 and 6)

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