The Bad Plus

From the release of their self-titled debut in 2001, The Bad Plus have transcended the limitations of genre, pushing the boundaries of how contemporary jazz is defined while cultivating broad appeal with a sound that impossibly straddles referential and pithy and ironic on one hand and total originality and affectation-free earnestness on the other. Forged in Minneapolis, the original lineup of pianist Ethan Iverson, drummer Dave King and bassist Reid Anderson soon became best known as a post-bop acoustic piano trio with a deep, abiding love of deconstructing (and reconstructing) pop tunes. Reveling in the chaos caused by upending and confusing what is meant by labels like highbrow and lowbrow, The Bad Plus quickly became as widely appealing as jazz musicians get these days. That they’ve always been greater than the sum of their state-of-the-music parts is something that sometimes gets lost in all the celebration of the band’s singular ability to turn jazz’s funhouse mirror on everyone from Nirvana and Radiohead to Stravinksy. But covers aside, The Bad Plus has always been defined by an electric chemistry borne of a commitment to melody, aggressive hooks, unpredictable harmony, improvisation and the best of jazz’s democratic ideals. In The Bad Plus, everyone writes and everyone solos. Beginning in 2010 (with Never Stop) and ending in 2015 (with The Bad Plus Joshua Redman), the band released five consecutive albums consisting of either entirely original music or—in the case of 2014’s The Rite of Spring—a note-for-note reimagining of a classical masterwork. Die-hards who thought they’d sorely miss the trademark pop deconstructions, in large part, didn’t or at least not inasmuch as it took away from their enjoyment of each musician’s expansive compositional talents. The collective musical knowledge base that the musicians have always worked from is astounding, seemingly inexhaustible. They’re not just musicians, but true students of literally every idiom; musical anthropologists who just happen to be among the best instrumentalists in the world! Of course, much was made when, in 2017, it was announced that founding pianist Ethan Iverson would be leaving the band by year’s end. But his replacement, Orrin Evans has, to riff on a tune from 2019’s Activate Infinity, dovetailed nicely, adding, with deftness and deference, his own brand of hard-bop dynamism to the band’s last two releases. From Evans’ first chords and King’s first triplets on “Avail,” Activate Infinity’s opener, it is clear that the band’s core aesthetic is still very much intact. This is unmistakably The Bad Plus, with a renewed joie de vivre for making the kind of music they’ve always made.

Photo Credit: Christopher Kayfield