Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau

Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau

NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP

Two Grammy winners combine their considerable talents.

Nickel Creek co-founder and mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile first played with jazz pianist Mehldau live in London during the latter’s Wigmore Hall residency in 2011, but it’s taken another five years for the pair to venture into the studio together. This longawaited collaboration has been worth the wait, allowing both musicians to venture into musical territory that is not necessarily their natural habitat. Mehldau sounds at home on folksy rambles like Tallahassee Junction while Thile imbues the jazz standard I Cover The Waterfront with a desolate tone, his plaintive vocals accompanied by suspenseful mandolin tremolos. Elsewhere, the pair conjure up a tremendous version of Gillian Welch’s Scarlet Town, revive Elliott Smith’s Independence Day as a skeletal piano/mandolin duet and transform Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right into a jaunty ragtime romp.