Career retrospectives such as this usually come much later in an artist's life, and this seven CD box set includes the five volumes of The Art of the Trio plus additional recordings 1997-2001, which include five previously unreleased tracks recorded live at the Village Vanguard. If anything, these albums underline how better suited Rossy's drumming was to Mehldau's world than the more equivocal Jeff Ballard, whose current tenure with Mehldau followed Rossy's and despite his impeccable technical credentials, was for some not completely successful. For a while, Mehldau enjoyed his status as the latest young gun-slinger in town, his densely layered harmonic approach rivalled only by his indulgent, often opaque, liner notes. During his seasons in the sun his playing reflected his love of and facility with, the classical canon, such as his rightly praised ‘Exit Music (For a Film).’ This aspect of his playing had an often overlooked influence on young, emerging European pianists in that it triggered the belief that if an American jazz musician could use classical “sounding” techniques in the jazz environment then it gave the green light to Europeans — certainly Esbjorn Svensson was one pianist who felt a sense of liberation as a result. The albums come with insightful liner notes by Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus, who makes the point that this ensemble was the “most significant new piano/bass/drums trio of the 1990s.” Of the five Art of the Trio releases, the second disc of volume five (the only 2-CD set in the collection) is rightly identified as perhaps the apotheosis of this collection, and Grenadier attributes this to their willingness to engage with slower tempos — “The manic energy subsided” — and here we hear the kind of moods inhabited by Bill Evans, although explored in quite a different, but equally distinctive manner, by Mehldau. Early in the liner notes, Iverson notes that Mehldau loved German romantic poetry, and on Volume 1, he comments that pieces like ‘Ron's Place’, ‘Lament for Linus’ and ‘Mignon's Song’ “somehow sound like 1960s innovations by Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock filtered through the sensibility of Rilke and Goethe.” It is something that lingers in the mind when listening to these albums. It is probably fair to say that Volume 3 of The Art of the Trio, the studio album Songs, turned heads in a way that his previous two volumes did not, since there was much interest in Mehldau's treatment of ‘Exit Music (for a Film)’, the rhythmic treatment of which Rossy later said was “probably just something I heard Jon Christensen play on a Keith Jarrett record, the ECM sound.” This piece and Nick Drake's ‘River Man’ from the same album also had the effect of reawakening jazz musicians to the better songs from popular culture, which for two generations had been studiously ignored, so making it appear as revolutionary a move as when Louis Armstrong began doing the same back in the early-1930s.