Twenty-first century jazz piano icon Brad Mehldau has been investigating the best ways to interpret his own selection of cults and classics from the rock music canon ever since he started hanging on the LA singer-songwriter scene in the mid-to-late 1990s. In solo piano he found the perfect format for the job, and on the outstanding 10 Years Solo Live 4-CD/8 LP set issued in 2015, his unique renditions of rock singer-songwriter material rivalled any of those from the Great American Songbook.

Mehldau has been inspiring new generations with his mesmerising takes on songs by British artists in particular: Radiohead, Nick Drake and indeed The Beatles, to whom he pays tribute on this outstanding new solo piano release Your Mother Should Know. Recorded live at the Philharmonie de Paris, it focusses mostly on a selection of the Fab Four's lesser-known album tracks, none of which have been recorded by him previously. Throughout, Mehldau is at his most succinctly refined, as if he has chipped away at anything non-essential or that sounds like it's falling into the trap of merely jazzing up The Beatles, as those before him have too frequently done. Psychedelia artefacts such as ‘She Said She Said’ and ‘I am the Walrus’ sound natural to piano instrumentation in his hands and he wittily extends The Beatles’ earlier period songs’ black American roots with old R&B, stride and gospel piano on readings of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Baby's in Black’, all delicately filtered through a vocabulary that includes jazz, blues, folk-rock and ‘romantic’ concert music.

Mehldau's highly expressive touch and use of rubato and dynamics are nothing less than exemplary and unexpected twists add a new dimension to the material without abstracting the original songs. It's a recipe that's likely to satisfy both jazz lovers and fussily dedicated Beatles fans alike.