that I definitely credit with helping to open me up to contemporary jazz music; I had been going through a bit of a prog. rock phase, and found a lot of the rhythmic and harmonic ideas in these artists' music, which encouraged me to delve more into jazz, eventually going back through history and growing to love the music. Mehldau was born in 1970 and took up the piano at a young age. His tastes were like those of his peers, rock and pop music, but in his early teens, he discovered jazz, playing in his high school jazz band, and gigging during the week after school. For college, he attended The New School, where he began to develop his own style, which was clearly jazz, but took those early influences of pop and rock and incorporated them in interesting ways. His ability to bridge these worlds is definitely how I was pulled in, as it wasn't too far down the jazzhole for me at the time, but challenged my tastes enough to make it interesting. This song comes from his 2019 album Finding Gabriel which I cannot recommend highly enough. It has some amazingly original and beautiful music, and this song (which was released as a teaser before the album itself) is no exception. It is built around a relatively simple harmonic idea which sort of has a Radiohead vibe, but then begins to build, and as more layers are used, the harmonies begin to get more complex, developing into some of the most interesting and incredibly moving vocal lines I've ever heard.