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.

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.