What does the music of Nirvana, Ornette Coleman, Pink Floyd, Rush, Burt Bacharach, Heart, Black Sabbath, K.D Lang, David Bowie, Tears For Fears, Yes and the Bee-Gees have in common? It’s all been lovingly appropriated and used as fuel for the earth-shaking catalogue of performances and recordings of the Bad Plus. Yes, earth-shaking – if you think you’ve heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Iron Man” before, listen again. Ok, now you’re thinking – those are hard rocking staples of their respective generations; what does it have to do with Burt Bacharach or the Bee-Gees?
This is what we can safely still call jazz, people; the American tradition of improvisation tempered by high-level musicianship.
Ethan Iverson plays piano, Reid Anderson plays bass, Dave King plays drums – a piano trio from Minneapolis. All the ingredients you need for excitement; no? Perhaps the defining factor separating true jazz from pop, rock, R&B, soundtrack scores, and other things mired in the depths of electronica, is that all but entirely, the jazz experience must be heard.
Their first release for Columbia, “These Are the Vistas” (2003) is a fine place to start. From a labeling standpoint – this is chamber music on methamphetamine. Without electronic assistance these guys are wringing formerly unheard sounds out of conventional instruments. With the assistance of master producer Tchad Blake the recordings convey the terrific power and dynamism of the group. Seven of ten tracks on the record are originals – bold, stunning and often humorous musical romps over the fringes of the jazz-scape. Then there’s the ominous “Smells Like
Teen Spirit” – not easy to convincingly describe how a piano trio tears the top off of this one; it just has to be heard.
Following with “Give” and “Suspicious Activity” the ultra loud attack delivered in hyper-real sonic transparency carried forward with more quirky and sometimes jaw-dropping original compositions.
Pay No Attention To The Piano Trio Behind The Curtain
A label and producer switch for 2007’s “Prog” didn’t slow them down a bit. As the title promises, they cover some progressive rock songs, beginning the album with a gorgeous rendition of Tears for Fears “Everyone Wants to Rule the World” on to a no-holds-barred treatment of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer”. Between this and the live shows, a broad slice of classic-era FM radio provides the starting point for much of their music. Which is usually the fork in the road for pop and rock where genre-fication occurs, and the artist is thrown into the retro/cover-band bin.
No the case with jazz.
Covering; re-interpreting a variety of pop, rock and soundtrack tunes is a given in the jazz tradition. Rather than stifle the precious concept of “originality”, playing standards lays the path for new territory. Discovering an oldie; being moved in such a way that nothing but a musical response will do...speaking it in your language; from this impulse original music is created.
With the Bad Plus’s 2009 release “For All I Care,” Tchad Blake returns and the stakes are once again raised – vocalist Wendy Lewis (also from Minneapolis) joins the group on almost every track; which this time, are all covers. “Never Stop,” released the following year, does a complete about face, comprised of original compositions. Serving meanwhile as artists in residence at Duke University, last spring the band performed Stravinsky’s “The Rite Of Spring” at Duke’s Reynolds Theater. The doors to interpretation swing as wide as music itself.
With the addition of the ten brilliant originals on 2010’s “Never Stop,” The Bad Plus has deepened their already bold signature, establishing them as a vital force in creative new music. For the purpose of this discussion I call attention however, to the covers – the lure, if you will, for the mainstream or classic rock listener to hear familiar beloved tunes dressed up in different clothes. The startling blend of covers and originals presented on “These Are The Vistas,” “Give,” and “Prog” were a contemporary look at what jazz, and in turn, creative musicianship is all about. With the addition of vocalist Wendy Lewis on “For All I Care,” the ground shifted, and it is to this particular album I would call your attention.
One of the wonderful things that an inspired, thoughtfully done cover-tune can do is to not only let you hear a song differently, but hear music in a new way.
Radio Favorites Through A Glass Darkly
From the opening bars of Nirvana’s “Lithium” the gauntlet is thrown.
Far from a commercial move toward more accessibility “For All I Care” poses a direct challenge – an unmistakably devoted, reverential musical response to pop and rock tunes that the four members of the group grew up listening to. Songs like Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”, Yes’s “Long Distance Runaround” and the Bee Gees (that’s right people) “How Deep is Your Love” have been utterly broken apart and reconstructed into the language being spoken here, which begs description.
Which is where our critical journey interrupts itself – after all, truly original music is best listened to...then spoken about.
Scott Cramer - Scott lives in Chicago and is an insufferable know-it-all on certain topics. He writes fiction (primarily short stories) much of which ...
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