Elan's got this tendency to look at life as a beautiful tragedy, which is sometimes beautiful enough to be happy about and sometimes too fucked up to try and sit up straight for. He is a connoisseur - of food, of obscure villages in Switzerland and of low limit poker tables in Atlantic City, where he dabbles in pre-flop bully tactics, scaring tables of pimple-faced frat boys and oxygen-sucking pensioners with his aggressive betting style. He is a man with a sense of humor, and a desire to see the beauty in the hideous, to take the ball strong to the hoop on a side street in Brooklyn, and drink a lot of bourbon while arguing that Led Zeppelin is the greatest band of all time. Trying to contradict him is difficult. He is 6 foot 8 inches tall and he makes a mean salad with sun-dried tomatoes and several kinds of cheese you can¹t pronounce. He has seen every important movie ever made, and read most important books written after 1960.
 
His new album (and band) The Elan Mehler Quartet is a
beautiful cipher of the life, language and attitude of a man who is fascinated by the things he lives and does, and who lives and does things well. Through arrangements of saxophone, piano, Fender Rhodes, and acoustic bass, Elan offers 10 pieces of music that reflect the beauty and discord of life to an elegant and subtle affect. Songs like Little Lost, and the Pale 45s play like abstract paintings of New York City, layered with various adjusting rhythms and patterns, overlapping and reacting as a sonic landscape that is as beautiful to the casual listener as it is under a microscope of complex jazz theory. Other tunes like Ruby D, and Scheme for Thought sound like brooding reflections on life ­ the real meaning of blues ­ one man's
catharsis taken up by a quartet of musicians with the sensitivity and chops to bring out all the nuance. It¹s the kind of record that sounds good the first time you hear it, and gets better with each listen as you begin to appreciate the refinement of the various undercurrents that guide the harmonic swell.