The Bad Plus is one of the highly hyped ‘new’
jazz piano trios that have been recording for the past decade
or so. Along with Esbjorn Svensson Trio (E.S.T.), Rachel
Z, and Brad Mehldau, the group is more interested in interplay
and melodic interpretation than sheer improvisation. Unlike
their peers, though, The Bad Plus is a raw, muscular outfit
that is at least at home with rock sensibilities as with
jazz. Drummer David King is a thrasher, while pianist Ethan
Iverson has both classical training and a variety of popular
music genres in his bag of tricks. Bassist Reid Anderson
is often up front and in your face. The group has made its
career thus far one of thumbing its nose at jazz orthodoxy,
and that’s all well and good—if you’ve
got enough interesting things to say to back it up.
Interestingly, the group’s latest effort is entitled
Prog, short for ‘progressive rock,’
a style of rock music that emphasized the display of musical
proficiency over the music’s actual content or, in
some cases, listenability. Both Anderson and King grew up
listening to prog bands like Rush, whose “Tom Sawyer”
is covered (or more properly, I guess, deconstructed) here.
At the time that Rush recorded this song, they had moved
from a flat-out prog group writing twenty-plus minute suites
to one which tried to convey their musicianship in shorter,
more radio-friendly bites. The Bad Plus’ cover of
the Rush tune is decent, if somewhat predictable, and could
definitely provide a bridge for rock fans between rock and
more jazz-oriented music, but it’s hard to imagine
listeners making the leap from this to, say, Keith Jarrett.
As on previous efforts (the group found some
success with their major label Sony releases, but have moved
to Heads Up for this release), there is a quality of sameness
that begins to prevail after the first few tracks. This
is counteracted a bit by the opener, a cover of the Tears
for Fears pop hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
Here, the group unfurls the song’s content somewhat
more slowly than usual and plays more with the melody than
on many of their covers. It’s a seductive opening,
and one feels pulled along by it until the second track,
an Anderson original entitled “Physical Cities”
hits. And it literally hits, driven by a thunking single-note
bash that is continued, towards the track’s conclusion,
until I had to check to see if my CD player was malfunctioning.
If the group was aiming for some kind of transcendence through
repetition, they missed it by a mile.
Ultimately, people’s feelings about
The Bad Plus are likely to revolve less around whether or
not this is jazz (that debate is rather moot in 2007) or
whether their covers are largely ironic (mostly not, I’d
say) but whether you actually find the sounds that they
create interesting enough to bring you back for multiple
listens to the same album. They tend to favor group improvisation
over individual solos, and this also requires an adjustment
in the way one listens to them. But another litmus test
that suggests itself is this: if the band were to disappear
tomorrow, would their recordings still be fresh and integral
parts of the listening repertoire for up and coming musicians
in, say, five years? My prediction would be that, like some
of their prog rock predecessors, much of what The Bad Plus
is playing today will not seem particularly fresh or interesting
in a few years.
There are bright spots, though, and those
are mostly to be found among the group’s original
compositions, which they lean on more heavily in concert
than the cover material. Anderson’s “Giant”
is a pretty tune that arrives like a cloud formation over
Anderson’s ostinato bass and King’s subdued
drumming that is reminiscent of a more electronica-dominated
beat. Here, Iverson’s piano classicisms come across
as less florid than on the grandiose cover of David Bowie’s
“Life on Mars.” King’s “Thriftstore
Jewelry” features the writer’s kinetic drumming
and the group’s oft-used time signature shifts, but
it hangs together really well, suggesting a somewhat drunken,
woozy bolero. Iverson’s “Mint” allows
him to show off his piano chops without becoming bombastic
or overdone. These three tracks, buried in succession in
the CD’s midsection, along with the closer, “1980
World Champion” provide the clearest evidence that
The Bad Plus will eventually leave some of their more questionable
tactics behind and rely on their individual and group strengths.
