Mehldau Fingers the Usual (and Not-so-usual) Suspects

Brad Mehldau is famous for his covers -- Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens, Alice in Chains. But covers don't quite, well, cover, what the jazz dynamo does with his keyboard. He elaborates on tunes in ways no one, especially not their makers, probably ever imagined, throwing in stunning chord progressions and lingering obsessively in places like a crazy lover outside a broken home. Sometimes you wonder how he comes to choose these tunes. It could just be the sheer challenge of turning melodies like "Black Hole Sun" into epic piano throwdowns worthy at times of Bill Evans, sometimes of Brahms and Debussy.

Pop songs didn't really figure in much to last week's sold out residency of Mehldau's trio at the Village Vanguard. But no one seemed to mind.

The piano man, with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard, opted for mostly original rhapsodic pieces that veered between the maximal and the mellow. When, during last Wednesday's 11 p.m. show, Mehldau wasn't prancing through his solos, his hands leaping over each other in subtle yet unrestrained floruishes, his partners expounded on the heavily rhythmic works with a vibrant, powerful virtuosity that seemed to stretch the walls of the old jazz cavern. Ballard, with an arsenal of stuff to throw at the drums, grew particularly explosive at times; Grenadier's supple pickings always kept things rolling. But at the end of the late show, it was Mehldau's soft and meandering touches on a delicate, sometimes Chopin-esque version of the ballad "Something Good" from The Sound of Music, that reminded of his capacity to turn the trivial into something near transcendental.