A new Brad Mehldau album, Where Do You Start, taking its name from the Johnny Mandel, Marilyn Bergman and Alan Bergman song, is to be released on 17 September, the pianist’s label Nonesuch has confirmed. It’s a companion album to the recently released Ode and comes ahead of tour dates next year when Brad Mehldau will be playing with former Avishai Cohen drummer Mark Guiliana.

Performing with his familiar trio of Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard on Where Do You Start, Mehldau, who is due to play the London Jazz Festival in November with the same line-up, has included his celebrated and so far unreleased take on Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Holland’ on this album, which Mehldau fans will know nearly always steals the show when he performs it live, often as an encore. But the album actually opens with ‘Got Me Wrong’ by Jerry Cantrell of the grunge band Alice in Chains, a song that appeared on the soundtrack of Kevin Smith’s film Clerks and was released as a single in the wake of the film’s runaway success in 1994.

Other tracks are ‘Brownie Speaks’ by Clifford Brown; ‘Baby Plays Around’, by Elvis Costello and his former wife Cait O’Riordan of The Pogues; ‘Airegin’ by Sonny Rollins; ‘Hey Joe’ by Californian folkster Billy Roberts made famous by Jimi Hendrix; ‘Samba E Amor’ by Rio legend Chico Buarque; ‘Jam’ by Mehldau, his only self-penned song on the album; ‘Time Has Told Me’ by Nick Drake, whose songs Mehldau interprets so intuitively; ‘Aquelas Coisas Todas’ by Clube da Esquina guitarist Toninho Horta; and the tearjerking ‘Where Do You Start.’

– Stephen Graham