Brad Mehldau jumps back with prog-heavy new album Jacob’s Ladder

US pianist Brad Mehldau returns with his explorative, sometimes hard-hitting, often rhapsodic new album, Jacob’s Ladder, via Nonesuch on 18 March. Featuring Mehldau’s label mates such as mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile, vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, drummer Mark Guiliana, singer/multi-instrumentalist Becca Stevens, NYC saxophonist Joel Frahm and others, the album very much picks up where his 2019 conceptual opus Finding Gabriel left off, stretching into new territory beyond his formative Radiohead covers and the groove-fuelled improv of his duo project Mehliana.

Commenting on the prevailing influences on Jacob’s Ladder, the pianist said: “The musical conduit on the record is prog,” Mehldau continues. “Prog – progressive rock – was the music of my childhood before I discovered jazz. It was my gateway to the fusion of Miles Davis, Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra and other groups, which in turn was the gateway to more jazz. The prog from Rush, Gentle Giant, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer… These bands and others have continued to influence newer groups that bring prog impulses into the arena of hard rock and screaming math metal, like Periphery, whose music is included here” and inspired the screaming vocals on album track ‘Herr und Knecht’.

Significantly, the album includes two vocal-led interpretations of Rush’s anthem ‘Tom Sawyer’, with an abstract opener ‘maybe as skies are wide’ and a fuzz-tone injected cover.

A video of ‘maybe as skies are wide’ can be watched below – and for more info visit www.bradmehldau.lnk.to/JacobsLadder