Brad Mehldau's latest album, released last week on Nonesuch, is the double-CD, DVD Live in Marciac, which captures a solo performance by Mehldau at the 2006 Jazz in Marciac festival in France. Fans in DC can catch a free solo performance from Mehldau in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, tomorrow night. The following night, he joins label mate Chris Thile and Gabriel Kahane for a sold-out performance at New York's (Le) Poisson Rouge, as part of his Debs Composer's Chair residency at Carnegie Hall. He'll conduct a pair of master classes at the venue this weekend, also in conjunction with Carnegie Hall.

Mehldau joins two other label mates, Joshua Redman and Timothy Andres, for performances at Carnegie Hall and at the Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the following weekend for a program that includes the world premiere of a new piece by Mehldau, titled Rock 'n' Roll Dances, along with selections from Andres's piece Shy and Mighty.

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The complete Shy and Mighty comprises pianist/composer Timothy Andres's debut album, released late last year on Nonesuch. Mehldau includes Andres's work in his New York Times Playlist, published this past weekend.

Andres "does something as a composer that I’ve never been able to do myself," Mehldau tells Times writer Nate Chinen. "He can create characters in music that you see and feel." He describes one piece off Shy and Mighty as "not like anything I’ve heard. It’s squarely tonal music, not post-Schoenberg in the sense of avoiding functional harmony. One minute it’ll have a gesture of Brahms, and then at other times, rhythmically, something that sounds like rock. And then something that sounds like jazz, with dominant seventh chords."

Mehldau's Playlist features a range of artists and styles, including, in addition to two other pianists, Tigran Hamasyan and Alexander Romanovsky, the metal band Cancer Bats and singer Becca Stevens. This eclectic list reflects Mehldau's approach to repertoire selection, given that he is "a jazz pianist enamored of many kinds of music, as his recent albums make clear," writes the Times. “Live in Marciac ... chronicles a recent solo piano concert, with his originals brushing up against songs by Radiohead, Nirvana and the Beatles. His previous Nonesuch album, Highway Rider, was a jazz-rock-classical hybrid that featured his writing for a string orchestra."

Read more and hear what Mehldau has to say about all of his Playlist selections at nytimes.com.

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Mehldau's performance of Radiohead's "Exit Music" on Live in Marciac and the release of the British band's own new album, prompted a piece on the NPR Music jazz blog A Blog Supreme. NPR's Patrick Jarenwattananon looks at this solo take and earlier such performances by the Brad Mehldau Trio, which have produced "the best jazz take on Radiohead," says Jarenwattananon.
 
"I'm not sure if Brad was the absolute first jazzman to have a go at Radiohead, but he was certainly the most influential," Jarenwattananon continues. "Mehldau's version—its artistry, but also its relative success and visibility—defined a model to embrace the musical zeitgeist, and even be overtly influenced by it."

While the solo version of "Exit Music" on Live in Marciac may differ considerably from the Mehldau Trio performances, that's valuable in and of itself.

Says Jarenwattananon: "if you listen to this 'Exit Music,' you'll hear that this version is a fairly deep revision of his playing on the trio version. That willingness and ability to re-imagine a staple of his repertoire is ... it's good to hear."

Read the complete piece at npr.org.

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To pick up a copy of Live in Marciac or any of the albums in the Brad Mehldau and Brad Mehldau Trio Nonesuch catalogs, head to the Nonesuch Store, where you'll also find Timothy Andres's Shy and Mighty. For more on Mehldau's upcoming tour, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.