Fantasy & Reveries

Brad Mehldau is the closest thing modern music has to someone like Keith Jarrett, not just because of his crystalline syntheses of jazz, classical music and the more harmonically advanced side of pop (check out his interpretations of both Radiohead and Elliott Smith), but for his total commitment to the potential of the piano as a solo instrument. A set in the vein of both the fragmented, COVID-era Suite: April 2020 and the Bach-inspired Three Pieces After Bach (and After Bach II), Fantasy & Reveries is a seemingly effortless expression of what makes Mehldau’s music compelling: one long and 14 short pieces that distil emotionally and intellectually complex ideas into music that snaps with the immediacy of a postcard. “Fantasy for Piano”—the long one—is impressive, but the real feats are in the reveries, in particular the rainy-day dissonance of “3”, the pensive “10” and “2”, whose diaphanous ’70s-style harmonies cluster, for one brief and smiling moment, into something that sounds almost like ragtime.