Brad Mehldau, Chris Thile, John Davis, und Brad Mehldau Trio

Brad Mehldau makes time stop still. When you hear him play, you'll discover you've forgotten to breathe – and you can't quite bring yourself to exhale and take the next breath, in case you'll somehow stop the notes bubbling out of the piano.

I remember seeing Brad Mehldau at the Sage in Gateshead in 2008 and being struck by the silence after every tune finished. Silence which seemed to last for hours: not because he had disappointed, but because collectively all of us in the audience felt the reluctance to applaud and shatter the spell. All you could hear was the creak of the piano stool as Mehldau straightened up and smiled.

Brad Mehldau can even weave that spell of intimacy and time-on-hold when on stage at a large festival – whether he's deconstructing a pop song (he plays a lot of Radiohead), a standard, or playing one of his own compositions. If you've ever seen Keith Jarrett live (or heard those legendary ECM recordings), Mehldau's playing is in a similarly absorbing, improvisational vein, and so it catches you completely unawares when you suddenly realise that what you're hearing is a melody by Nirvana!

More recently Mehldau has been playing more synths and keyboards, as part of his Electric Duo with drummer Mark Guiliana, so his acoustic piano performances may be somewhat rarer these days.

The mandolin is a beautiful instrument that is, in my opinion, severely underplayed in the music industry, but Christ Thile’s incredibly use of the instrument to support his solo performances absolutely blew me away at the recent concert. He made his was to centre stage and stood in front of the microphone before tuning the mandolin before introducing himself and then launching into his set.

He opened with an instrumental piece that was written in an experimental folk style. I hadn’t heard it on any of his recordings, and it didn’t look like anyone in the audience had either, but the crowd erupted into applause when he finished. With so many records under his belt, I wasn’t sure how he was going to select a set list, but he did so magnificently. When he played the title track from his Grammy Award winning album, True Live Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe, he got everyone singing along, and invited us to stand up to dance along.

As well as his instrumental skills, his distinctive voice contrasts beautifully with his mandolin, and the sound that they create together is exciting and original.

Bradford Alexander "Brad" Mehldau is an explorer of all things music. He concentrates mainly on jazz, but has been known to put in other influences into his composition. For his live performances, he switches between solo piano jazz or will work as a part of a trio When he plays as part of the trio, he plays the piano while Larry Grenadier plays standing bass, and Jeff Ballard playing the drums. Together they play very classical jazz, so many of the audience members are specifically classic jazz fans. They are all very respectful, and always give a warm applause at the end of a song. The music is very laid back, and enjoyable. Like with all jazz shows, each live set will vary by a lot, or by a little. It really depends on the specific emotions and feelings that they may be feeling during that particular performance. One of the best parts about watching a live jazz set is the emotion that the performers get lost in. Watching Brad play his riffs, he isn’t necessarily looking at the keys, its more of the emotions are driving his fingers to express a specific tone. There is no structure to the structure…the original meta expression.