The video above, well it’s only audio really with the album pack shot flickering into view, not exactly all singing and dancing, something that might actually be a relief to the energy-deprived Mehldau obsessive in your life, a substantial tribe by now stalking (or one and the same) the beJarretted, after the exhilarating exhaustion of Mehliana, accompanies ‘Little Person’ from the new Brad Mehldau trio album, their first in four years.

You can’t really have a glut of Mehldau but recently there has been plenty of the solo variety. Now his long time label Nonesuch have announced details of a new trio album Blues and Ballads, Mehldau once again with double bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard, a band that began with 2005’s Day Is Done. The new one is to be released in June.

AND ONE HE FEATURED ON WITH A SINGER A TRACK THAT’S STILL HARDLY KNOWN. SHHH

I can’t resist this and have copied it in from a chance spot last year when I turned up luckily early for the support act at a Roberto Fonseca/Fatou concert and caught an artist Mehldau has worked with, French-Israeli singer/songwriter Yael Naïm previously unknown to me. Her own song ‘Coward’ features Mehldau (he wasn’t playing at that Barbican concert). It missed me completely beforehand, but I’m not sure if it even got a full release beyond France although released on vinyl for Record Store Day and wild on the Internet to bloom in splendid apparent isolation (EPs always get a bit lost, too). The lyrics are excellent and there was an immediacy here that some of the other material at the gig lacked particularly when Naïm explored her inner operatic diva.

Check the Mehldau, very proper, classical introduction and the way he shadows the singer plus the later flourishes. Mehldau has worked with singers, usually classical divas before, but this breaks new genre-redundant ground for him surely. Simply a wonder. SG