Elan Mehler

“Mehler’s touch is as nuanced as Bill Evans’s, and his phrasing draws on both jazz and classical music without directly importing licks from either.  The subdued certainties of his playing bring a crowded room to total silence.” --John Fordham, The Guardian Elan Mehler grew up outside of Boston and started playing piano and composing at the age of 6.  A graduate of the NYU Music program where he studied with jazz with pianists Frank Kimbrough and Don Friedman and classical with Deirdre O’Donahue.  In 2000 Elan spent a year in Paris being the house pianist at the “Malone’s Bar.”  Which he credits as the largest piece in his musical education.  On returning to NYC Elan formed his first trio and performed at the Knitting Factory, Tonic, Smalls, Barbes, The Elbow Room, The Living Room and any other room that had a piano and would let him in.  In 2006 he met BBC Radio Presenter and Record Producer Gilles Peterson at a solo piano gig in Switzerland and was subsequently signed to his fledgling Brownswood Records.
Called “disorienting and fascinating” by MOJO magazine and a “...refreshingly slow answer to our trashy nanosecond pop culture” by Time Out London, Elan Mehler, the pianist and star discovery of Radio 1 veteran Gilles Peterson has released three albums on Brownswood Recordings.  2007's "Scheme For Thought" called a "...work of mellow magnificence" by Time Out and garnering a four star review from MOJO Magazine, was selected as a top ten record of 2007 by the editor of Jazzwise Magazine.  2009's "The After Suite," "a masterpiece with a capital 'M,"  --All About Jazz, was hailed as "...positively rhapsodic" by Time Out.  2010's collaboration with the Oklahoman singer-songwriter Adam McBride-Smith, Half Seas Over, built  "...a productive relationship between two genres of music that few jazz artists other than Bill Frisell have managed to splice..." The Guardian, received a four star review from Uncut Magazine and  was called an "immediate contemporary classic" by Rockerilla.  Elan recently signed with Challenge Records and his album Being There, Here includes trio standards featuring Tod Hedrick and Max Goldman.