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Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
The new Bad Plus, from left, Chris Speed, Reid Anderson, Dave King and Ben Monder.
(Photo: Evelyn Freja)Especially by the fickle standards of jazz band shelf lives, The Bad Plus has enjoyed a very good run. With the release of Complex Emotions, the 19th album in a discography now stretching back a quarter century, the epic Bad Plus saga continues — with a few twists along the way.
The salient capital-T twist of the last few years witnessed the core founding duo and songwriting machinery of drummer Dave King and bassist Reid Anderson in sharp pivot mode. The group’s 21-year status as a subversive-yet-accessible piano trio — 17 with Ethan Iverson and a few years with Orrin Evans — shifted into the current neo-jazz-rockier sound of a quartet with tenor saxophone and distorted electric guitar (Chris Speed and Ben Monder, respectively).
After Evans left to pursue his own thriving solo career, currently enjoying deserved kudos and attention, King and Anderson pondered the long-brewing idea of playing with a quartet or wondering if The Bad Plus had run its course. As King explains, they opted to call on Speed and Monder, whom they’d played with for years in various situations, and see “what happens if we pivot this thing completely to a different instrumentation, and then we kind of started to lean in and go. It’s fun to restart something that has in it a DNA continuation. It continues the connection of Reid and I. We started playing music together when we were 14 years old. Now we’re 54. We’re at 40 years of playing music together, and we’re still trying to stay fresh.”
Speaking of the current incarnation and the new album, King describes the prevailing company spirit in the band: “Here we are, we are on record number two with this new band, and there’s no signs of slowing and no signs of needing to explain ourselves. We’re not in the world to make things hoping people understand. We feel just sort of, ‘This is what we have to offer.’
“Maybe the album captures three years of nonstop road work and the idea that there’s a tune of Chris’ on it [the funky “Cupcake One”] and a tune of Ben’s on it [the impressionistic album closer “Li Po”], which stretches the compositional view even further. It’s an exciting time for us.”
As heard on the new album and this group’s 2022 debut, cagily entitled simply The Bad Plus. (note the period for emphasis), and in live forum — such as a livewire set at the 2023 Monterey Jazz Festival — the textural game has changed, but the evolutionary arc and story remains true to Bad Plus form. Holding down the core identity and essence of The Bad Plus is the kinship of King and Anderson, whose musical connection goes back to their formative years as musically curious teens in Minneapolis. Among their Twin Cities musical pals were pianist Craig Taborn and bassist Anthony Cox.
King and Anderson share a certain dry, absurdist sense of humor and a will to create a fresh sound by writing infectious and sometimes quirky songs blessed with … well, complex emotions and forms. They also heed a self-defined doctrine of tapping into various musical directions, in jazz and beyond.
This, after all, is a group whose “cover” material ranges from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” to an ambitious trio arrangement of Igor Stravinsky’s Modernist masterpiece Rite of Spring (after several performances about a decade ago, they had to cease and desist, for legal reasons).
King notes that he and Anderson “grew up listening to all kinds of jazz music and rock music and classical music. Instead of turning things away and thinking hierarchically, we would just let it all in naturally. Whether or not [The Bad Plus is] a rock band, a jazz group, has fusion elements, whether or not it was this or that, at the end of the day, it’s more of an art project statement.”
Another matter of complexity in the band approach is a playful exploration of odd and compound meters, but deployed in a natural and artful way.
On the new album, tunes like King’s 5/4 “Casa Ben” (about a historic house, not about Ben Monder, King clarifies), the slippery metric schemes of Anderson’s “French Horns” (so named because the composer felt there weren’t enough songs about or for French horns) and other tunes make the foursquare 4/4 groove of Speed’s “Cupcakes One” feel like a misfit.
Among the barbs from critical detractors, the band has endured. King cites the misguided comment along the lines of, “‘Oh, you know, The Bad Plus will not use some jazz harmony, only every now and again. That must mean that they don’t know jazz harmony.’ That was always so laughable to us, like the idea that Jackson Pollock didn’t know how to paint. We’d have to painfully listen to that kind of observation.
“We’re not creating out of limitation. Sometimes we’ve used blatant minimalism as a tool, whereas in modern jazz, you don’t hear a lot of people using blatant minimalism. It widens our sound. We’re creating out of conceptualization.
“To restrain yourself from all the tools that you have was an important idea to us. We could sit and play everything in odd meter. We could sit and play polyrhythmic fractures and could use chromatic harmonic systems. We could do all these things all the time, and then have long solos and blow at the end. That’s never been enough for us — ever.
“We’re interested in song structure and the idea of some sort of hook in the music that you can hang your hat on. Then we can, scorched-earth-style, improvise together, mess with structure, stress the foundation of structure, and then see what it can withstand. And from that, we feel like that can be an interesting, more complex space to inhabit artistically.”
On paper, the Bad Plus success story suggests an overnight sensation, which led to the trio becoming a collective variation on the venerable piano trio tradition, a neo-trio for the 21st century.
The group’s 2000 album Motel, on the Fresh Sounds New Talent label, garnered a major buzz of critical attention, from the New York Times on down, luring the attention of Columbia Records.
That buzz, according to King, “was the way we went into the world, like an open door. We shot through it because we had been kind of pounding around for so many years. We were off the radar, and were 32 years old when we signed with Columbia Records. We had put the band together and we were just gonna do whatever it takes and stay together. And we just pounded it for a few years, touring in vans, and we released that little record. And it just kind of caught fire, which led to the Columbia debut, which we were able to make into an impactful album.
“We had this idea to look at the piano trio, look at its history. Now what can we do to it? How do we reconceptualize and recontextualize the piano trio?”
The audience and critical response was strong, immediate and surprisingly broad in its appeal. King notes, “It was a huge point of pride for us that we would have jazzheads at the show and also a very large demographic of age differences, generational differences, sitting together at our shows.
“It was this idea that we drew not only learned, diehard jazz people, but indie rock people, hip-hop people and electronic music fans — different people coming from different backgrounds, checking us out and being kind of turned on to whatever information was in there. It was a more complex relationship, more of a mixed media art relationship. It wasn’t like, ‘I like rock music, so I want the rock beats in the jazz songs.’
“It was much more like, there was an energy to our openness that I think made people feel like it was OK to enter those hallowed halls and maybe not have Mal Waldron records in your collection,” he laughs, “but be able to go, ‘You know what? I like this.’
“Our ethos has always been, ‘We love this, and we think you will, too.’ It’s not about exclusion, it’s about inclusion from note one. And we believe that if Thelonious Monk, you know, we believe Thelonious Monk translates to many, many people that wouldn’t know anything about jazz or anything. I’ve always felt like I could play a Thelonious Monk record for my 5-year-old son. He was like, ‘I love this.’
“I think that art, in general, would be appreciated more across the board if people were less intimidated by it. If you could contribute to that energy by being open, by being unpretentious and not insulting your audience and avoiding hierarchical thinking, then your audience is gonna grow naturally.”
Cryptic and drolly funny titles for both albums and songs are part and parcel of the Bad Plus spirit. In one example, they tapped into a seeming work ethic motto for the 2010 album title Never Stop, then jokingly dubbing their first album with Evans, in 2018, Never Stop II. Could there be a Never Stop III in the future?
King says, with a laugh, “Maybe in 20 years when Chris and Ben finally retired from The Bad Plus, and it’s just Reid and I, finally making that duo album we always wanted to make.” DB
“Watching people like Max Roach or Elvin Jones and seeing how they utilize the whole drum kit in a very rhythmic and melodic way and how they stretched time — that was a huge inspiration to me,” Hussain said in DownBeat.
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