Upon embarking on Three Pieces After Bach, a project premiered at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2015, Brad Mehldau was immediately clear in his approach: “This is not about doing jazzy Bach. I have nothing against that, but my program only includes works by Johann Sebastian Bach or my own music.” Even if the influence of classical music – and Bach in particular – has always been major for many jazzmen, what Brad Mehldau proposes here is quite new. The American pianist has always approached his art without blinkers and with an unfailing intellectual rigor, whether he is playing his own composition or a jazz standard, or even a pop theme by Radiohead. Three Pieces After Bach is above all his personal way of taking Bach’s legacy on new paths. From the Modern Jazz Quartet to Jacques Loussier, Joachim Kühn and, more recently, Dan Tepfer, the history of jazz is full of experiments with the Leipzig Cantor. But the one offered by Mehldau is unlike any other.