Deregulating Jazz

Released in 2000, 'Deregulating Jazz' serves as a pivotal document of Brad Mehldau's ability to synthesize disparate musical lineages. While the title suggests a breaking of rules, the music is actually highly disciplined, utilizing rigorous counterpoint and classical development within a jazz trio framework. The album is most notable for its inclusion of 'Paranoid Android' and 'Bottle Up and Explode,' tracks that helped cement Mehldau's reputation as the primary bridge between the indie rock canon and modern jazz. This era of Mehldau's work is characterized by a 'crystalline' touch and a rejection of standard 'head-solo-head' structures in favor of through-composed feeling improvisations. Critically, the album was praised for its intellectual depth and for proving that pop repertoire could be treated with the same harmonic sophistication as the most complex jazz standards. It remains a cornerstone of the 'New Jazz' movement of the early 2000s.