Reviews

Half Seas Over

“Together they explore Nick Drake/James Taylor-styled jazz-folk songs that focus on a fine balance between McBride-Smith’s laconic vocal delivery and superbly crafted lyrics and Mehler’s supremely well-paced piano work.”

–Time Out London

“Building a productive relationship between two genres of music that few jazz artists other than Bill Frisell have managed to splice.”

–The Guardian

PICS BY CHLOE DEVIS

“An immediate contemporary classic.”

–Rockerilla Magazine (IT)

[4 STARS]
–Uncut Magazine

“A salubrious, refreshing album that effortlessly sweeps through styles, conjuring reminiscences from Davey Graham to Charlie Mingus. In today’s melting pot of mish-mashed musical styles, this makes the important transcendence from two different approaches, to one complete unique creation. Highly recommended.”

–Epoch Times

“Half Seas Over both deliberatly washes over you and makes you sit up to take in the intelligent lyrics…is certain to make the ‘best of’ lists at the end of the year.”

–Fly Global Music Culture

“Half Seas Over represents the point where McBride-Smith’s more countrified leanings and Mehler’s classic Mingus-Miles-Monk lineage meet. And what a sensational meeting it is: their first full album together (out on May 3rd), contains thirteen songs of brooding tenderness and oceanic strangeness, some veined with Liam Robinson’s darkly rich, wheezy accordion….If there’s any justice we’ll be seeing plenty more of them in the future.”

–METRO (UK)

“This new fully-fledged collaboration has liberated the pair to create something that will appeal to a great swathe of music fans. Unashamedly mellow and melancholy, the instrumentation is sparse but played to a truly captivating standard.”

–Juno Music Reviews

 

Scheme For Thought

 
Carl Honoré may have written the manifesto for a lackadaisical lifestyle, in his essential read for frenetic stressheads everywhere ‘In Praise Of Slow’. But New York jazz pianist Elan Mehler has created its perfect soundtrack. Since the days of Art Tatum’s Chopin-on-speed keyboard gymnastics, both classical and jazz piano players have used and abused the instrument’s quicksilver surface for manly displays of technique. Not so for Mehler.

Released on Gilles Peterson’s burgeoning Brownswood label, Mehler’s debut ‘Scheme For Thought’ is chilled jazz that doesn’t require you turn into a skunk-smoking twat to actually feel its relaxational properties. Miraculously, Mehler also avoids the ear-bleeding blandness of smooth jazz, focusing on the shimmering organic resonances created by acoustic piano, Fender Rhodes, double bass and tenor sax to form an intimate quartet. The mellow masterstroke is the absence of a drummer, or indeed any percussive sounds whatsoever. Instead hypnotic waves of interlocking chords of piano and Rhodes, softly pulsing bass and honey-toned tenor sax weave seamlessly into bonsai-sized melodic gems.

Label boss Peterson was himself entranced by the lanky Brooklynite’s slow musical alchemy when he discovered him while kicking back in a swanky Swiss hotel, when Mehler picked out the album’s title track on the lobby piano.  Filling the ‘quietly intelligent’ slot among Peterson’s twenty first-century stable of neo-jazz talent (including the bombastic Heritage Orchestra and laconic neo-soul boy José James), acid jazz this ain’t. There’s also a very un-NYC romantic melancholy bubbling under here, too, a brooding elegance that acts as an audaciously slow antidote to the perspirations of fast hard bop. Starting at the Vortex on Thursday, Mehler will appear across the city alongside his band of bassist Tod Hedrick, tenorist Andrew Zimmerman and David Moore on Fender Rhodes. Seek them out and discover a refreshingly slow answer to our trashy nanosecond pop culture.

-Mike Flynn, Time Out London

Elan Mehler – currently in London and playing various venues next week – is the young pianist from Brooklyn who so impressed British DJ and producer Gilles Peterson when he ran across him in a bar in the Alps that he signed him up immediately. This album has an unusual, drumless lineup, with Mehler on acoustic piano, David Moore on Fender Rhodes, plus Tod Hedrick’s soft and accurate bass, and the smoky, cool-school tenor sax of Andrew Zimmerman. It’s wistful, dreamy, beautifully executed music, like the soundtrack to a romantic movie – but its avoidance of handy get-outs such as catchy grooves, idiomatic references or big climaxes marks it out as a confident statement.
Mehler’s improvising manipulates classical vocabularies more than jazz ones, but the solo passages here suggest that the sax, though very musical, is a bit of a distraction from Mehler’s pure essence. Even Elvis Presley Blues, the nearest thing to a formulaic reference, leaves the narrative up to the drifting harmony changes. It’s introspective, and often sounds like classical music played with a jazzer’s spontaneity. But Mehler is certainly in a fascinating world of his own, in more than one sense.

-John Fordham, The Guardian

 
BBC Radio 1 DJ Gilles Peterson was reclining in the bar of the apparently quite chic Hotel Therme in Vals, Switzerland, when he first heard the radically calming sound of Brooklyn pianist Elan Mehler. Immediately captivated, Gilles returned for the next two nights. So now, this young player and composer is making his debut on Peterson’s own Brownswood label, easily qualifying as its most reclined issuance to date. Mehler favours a fairly unusual line-up, his own acoustic piano being matched by the electric Fender Rhodes keys of David Moore. Andrew Zimmerman blows throaty tenor saxophone and Tod Hedrick strokes warm bass. They don’t have a drummer in the band, so Mehler’s pieces automatically dwell over in the chamber jazz nook. This is beautifully calming music, inwardly-routed and pensive, the players circling around each other in a luminescent pool. Notes are carefully enunciated, making slight repeats, returning figures whilst they’re mulled over at length. It’s a jazz balm… The two-keyboard dialogue is reminiscent of the various permutations favoured by Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett in the late-1960s outfits of Miles Davis. There’s also a softly chiming layer-building that sounds like Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint”, as performed by Pat Metheny. There’s a distinctiveness to the compositions that’s difficult to pin down in terms of jazz precedents. The foursome pay great attention to tone and timbre, texture and tingling, as Zimmerman’s tenor luxuriates in its own clear space, each soloist leaning forward naturally when their time comes to take leave of the general clinging. The soloing regime is never clear: it’s more of an organic flow. Listen to “The Pale 45s”, where Zimmerman’s thistled tenor cuts to a sudden high Fender Rhodes phrase, with bowed bass underlay, then Mehler enters with a boldly simple melody figure. This may well be the pianist’s quartet, but what they make is very much a collective music…

Martin Longely, BBC Music

The After Suite

This achingly beautiful, elegant album is only the second from Brooklyn-based pianist and composer Elan Mehler, being the follow-up to his debut, Scheme For Thought (Brownswood, 2007), another quietly sensational disc. If it might have seemed rather too breathless to have hailed a debut as a masterpiece, the temptation cannot be resisted second time out. The After Suite is a masterpiece with a capital “M.”

 

A dreamy, spacious, alternating current of poignancy and joy, Mehler’s writing and playing has changed not at all over these two albums, though he’s expanded his band’s lineup. Scheme For Thought was made by a drummer-less quartet—piano, Fender Rhodes (sparingly employed, as it is on the new album), tenor saxophone and bass. The After Suite retains those instruments (though only bassist Tod Hedrick of their players) and adds drums. These give the music a stronger pulse, and more obvious jazz provenance, than was apparent on the debut album, which had some enthusiasts reaching for classical analogies. “The 54th Leap,” for instance, as the title suggests, has the swinging, percussive vigor of Paul Desmond ‘s “Take Five.” Vocalists Becca Stevens and Adam McBride-Smith are also featured, between them singing on eight of the 11 tracks, sometimes with lyrics, sometimes wordlessly.

Six of the tunes are Mehler originals, and were written, he says, after “a life-changing breakup.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine music this affective being produced without some preceding trauma and catharsis. Two further tunes are collaborations, another is by McBride-Smith, another is a traditional Hebrew hymn, and the eleventh, “I Dream A Highway,” is by alt-country artist Gillian Welch, whose “Elvis Presley Blues” was the sole non-original on Scheme For Thought. Welch’s writing is winning admirers amongst jazz musicians, and Mehler is one of a small number of jazz composers who can consistently match her note for gorgeous note.

On The After Suite, Mehler’s delicately rhapsodic piano playing is as much concerned with collective performance as it is with soloing, which is shared with saxophonist Jeremy Viner. With material as top drawer as that to hand, all Mehler would really have to do is embellish the themes a little, and we’d all still go home happy. But he digs deeper than that. Viner is another substantial voice, most often dreamily noir and school-of-Lester Young-ish, but on occasion sinewy and hot.

Still a cult figure, most of Mehler’s breaks have so far come in Europe. London label Brownswood’s owner, Gilles Peterson, best known in the UK as a jazz/funk DJ, chanced upon Mehler playing solo piano in a Swiss hotel some three years ago, and was entranced. A short, limited edition disc released by Brownswood started a buzz, and Scheme For Thought built upon it. By the autumn of 2007, Mehler was selling out at London’s sharpest jazz club, The Vortex (the room is indeed small, but the queue was disproportionately long).

The After Suite deserves to take Mehler’s reputation further still. Albums this special come along only rarely.

Chris May, All About Jazz

Brooklyn-based jazz pianist Elan Mehler is that rare thing, a US musician who sounds European. He was discovered while playing a Swiss residency, but his style seems to have moved further north and west. Singer Becca Stevens has a passing resemblance to Norwegian artist Solveig Slettahjell, with a pleasingly cool, detached approach. She contributes wordless vocals to the title track and The 54th Leap, reminiscent of British pioneers Mike Taylor, Norma Winstone and Michael Garrick, if less harmonically ambitious. A distinctive, riff-based approach to arrangement mixes interlocking keyboards with bass, drums and Jeremy Viner’s brooding sax. There’s one cover: a slow-motion version of Gillian Welch’s I Dream a Highway. Two tracks featuring rising singer-songwriter Adam McBride give the album a shift in mood: introspective but commercial.

–John L. Walters, The Guardian

After an impressive debut with “Scheme for thought” on the Brownswood label, Elan Mehler returns with the gorgeous “The After Suite”. Elan’s sophomore release reaches higher degrees of sublimity than the first disc. Each composition is rich in harmony and is augmented by the inclusion of vocalists, particularly Becca Stevens. Her phrasing is so soothing on tracks like “Factory” and “The 54th Leap” and each is simply superb. “The After Suite Part 2” is another tune that strikes that delicate balance between powerful and tenderness. “Strange Bird” is a stirring solo that is a glorious display of Elan’s supreme talents. I could go on about but you need to experience the sheer beauty of this record for yourself. Quite simply, this is an absolute gem that you shouldn’t miss.

-Reg Dancy, Basic Soul

This brooding Brooklynite pianist made his sparsely beautiful debut last year with “Scheme For Thought” (also for Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood imprint).  Featuring a drum-free quartet of piano, Fender Rhodes, sax and bass it was packed with softly interlocking melodies that melted together like smoke rings at a particularly heavy session.  The antithesis of the Sturm and Drang of much of today’s angry post-jazz, Mehler’s agenda was one of meditative contemplation at the state we’re in, not a guttural rage against the machine.  Thus his noirish follow up, “The After Suit” was part inspired by what he describes as a “life-changing break-up”.  Both drums and vocals are invited in to the mix, pricking the stoner fog of Mehler’s debut.

Vocalist Becca Stevens evokes the unsettled mood from the off.  ”Factory” is a paranoid ode to creeping suspicion, before tenorist Jeremy Viner’s warm sax opens up on a fuzzy Dexter Gordon-ish solo.  Mehler bay be exploring darker territory here, hut his pristive playing has a brubeck-style crspness.  In places, it’s positely rhapsodic, such as on exquisite solo piece “Strange Bird” and Hebrew hymn “He Nay Ma Tov.”   The album’s zenith is reached on two songs featuring singer Adam McBride-Smith, who evokes the spirit of primetime James Taylor and every jazzer’s favourite folkie Nick Drake.

Mike Flynn, Time Out