# CD review: Brad Mehldau – Jacob’s Ladder 2022: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/12/26/cd-review-brad-mehldau-jacobs-ladder-2022-video-cd-cover-2/
- Published: 2022-12-26T00:04:52+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The pianist draws on an unlikely combination of childhood obsessions for this 
hard-hitting, audacious electronic hybrid.**

The great jazz pianist Brad Mehldau has long relished ambiguities above predictable
outcomes, and delicacy over muscle, but it was 70s prog-rock that obsessed him in
his classical-pianist childhood, and indirectly became his route into jazz via the
70s/80s electric music of Miles Davis, Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Jacob’s Ladder is the latest of several hard-hitting electronic hybrids that he 
has scattered as tributes to that past among his beautifully crafted acoustic chamber-
jazz ventures over the years. Some might flinch at the core materials here – prog
rock and Christian scriptures – but this epic venture’s panoramic soundscape, storyteller’s
control of dynamics, and canny use of guest players including country-music mandolinist/
singer Chris Thile and jazz/hip-hop drums maestro Mark Guiliana, show how far Mehldau
has come as a sophisticated manipulator of complex materials.

He audaciously transfers a line from Canadian prog trio Rush’s 1981 hit Tom Sawyer
to a child’s classical-treble vocal register for the haunting Maybe As His Skies
Are Wide. Prog-metal vocal ranting mixes with massed-keyboard countermelodies on
the hurtling Herr und Knecht. And Gentle Giant’s Cogs in Cogs becomes the Becca 
Stevens vocal centrepiece to a three-part mini-suite shifting from skimming keyboard
improv over racing drums to synth-painted baroque counterpoint in its finale. A 
Weather Report-ish groove and an agile piano/mandolin dialogue illuminate Tom Sawyer,
and the title track splices biblical recitation, rapturous choral sounds and plenty
of jazzy jamming.

Hardcore proggers may be a shade perplexed by Mehldau’s use of their heroes’ hits,
and though preacherly Christianity is discreet, it’s certainly in earshot. But it’s
possible just to relish a unique contemporary musician’s ingenious mingling of a
traditional and contemporary sound palette, with plenty of characteristically freewheeling
jazz detours on the way.

![](https://i0.wp.com/www.jazzwise.com/media/229624/brad-mehldau-jacob-s-ladder.
jpeg?resize=640%2C640&ssl=1)

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