Brad Mehldau graba en Septiembre de 2000 este álbum temático dedicado a las ciudades dónde había ofrecido conciertos en años anteriores. "Places" es otro gran álbum del trío que acompaña al excelente pianista: Larry Grenadier al bajo y Jorge Rossy a la batería. Mehldau se consolida como el pianista más importante de este incipiente siglo XXI.
Brad Mehldau is becoming a more interesting, more thought-provoking, more individualistic musician with each release -- breaking away from the same old models, finding new ones to integrate into his own personality. The 11 compositions on this CD were conceived on the road, and only midway through did Mehldau realize that they developed similar ideas. Which indeed they do, seizing upon repeated riffing and vamps that Keith Jarrett has explored and sending them in cogent directions. The designated theme is travel; each selection bears the name of a place or mood, and the catchy, contemplative "Los Angeles" serves as the album's bookends, as well as a solo pit stop in the center. Like Elegiac Cycle, Places works like a song cycle; a unified, beautifully proportioned conception, with lots of rambunctious, swinging outbreaks amidst the contemplation. The titles in themselves mean nothing as far as the content of the music is concerned -- or so he writes in another lengthy, provocative liner note. Rather, the album is about the constancy of his personality and musical language, taking all of your personal mental baggage with you wherever you travel. This is an important album, one that anyone interested in piano jazz ought to check out.
Places, from 2000, continues conceptually where the previous ‘Elegiac Cycle’ left off. It is a cycle with a theme that returns once more in the end. The role of memory is also important here. The opening motto heard in ‘Los Angeles’ returns throughout the record and plays on our memory. Los Angeles was home for Mehldau during this time, so the theme often represents home, but home seen from a distance.
The idea is that a place is more captivating in our memory than it ever was when we were actually present there. Mehldau explains his experience of this phenomenon in the liner notes of the album, and understands this irony as something central to our experience of life. The titles of the record are, to a certain point, obligatory: each song is named after where it was written, over a year’s time that was full of travel.
But this record is emphatically not a ‘travelogue’: the songs do not necessarily reflect anything of the place where they were written, and if they do, it is incidental and not central to the theme of the record. “The album’s theme is a bit solipsistic, actually,” says Mehldau, “because it deals with the subject’s own consciousness – my own – more than whatever object I’m perceiving or not perceiving.” The group of compositions is roughly split half and half between a solo piano setting and the trio format, with Larry Grenadier on bass and Jorge Rossy on drums.
