The Bad Plus
Preview of The Bad Plus @ the Ramada Entertainment Centre
John Kendle

Try as they might, the members of The Bad Plus just can’t get no respect in some corners of the jazz world.
The New York-by-way-of-the-Midwest piano trio has been one of the most prolific acts of this decade, having released four albums with Columbia Records (three studio releases and a live record) and two indie CDs since 2001.

Its blend of elements of funk, pop, classical and rock within a trad-jazz configuration has earned the group a global audience — from South Korea to Brazil to Canada to Moscow (where it played a residency at Le Club in late December).

Yet there are some jazz critics who simply refuse to accept the trio’s music. Just as the Kronos Quartet was reviled in parts of the new music world, so too are The Bad Plus in the jazz milieu.

It’s a phenomenon which still steams Bad Plus drummer David King, so much so that he acknowledges there are two subtexts to the band’s latest album title, Suspicious Activity? The first has to do with the paranoia of post-9/11 America, while the second has to with the band’s standing in some circles — as if the music of King, pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Reid Anderson was somehow subversive.

“I find it funny that so many things can be made a threat when examined under harsh light, yet one of the things that seems to threaten some people is art,” King says. “One of the things we continually marvel at is the feeling that there is something devious about something we find beautiful.”

At issue with some purists seems to be the fact that King, Iverson and Anderson like to take accepted ideas and turn them on their heads. One outtake from Suspicious Activity? was a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, for example, while one tune that did make it is a cover of Vangelis’ (Theme From) Chariots of Fire, in which the familiar melody is nearly submerged beneath a rockin drum part.
“The reaction is that we are trying to storm the jazz castle and take it apart or something,” King says. “Jazz is something that has to move and which keeps on moving, yet some critics want it to return to some mythical level of purity, and it’s just not going to return.”

After venting for a few more minutes, King does relent.

“It’s not that heavy an issue with us and there’s not that heavy a double meaning to the album title,” he says. “We’re in our mid-30s and we’ve been doing this for a long time, and we realize we’re lucky to be doing anything. But sometimes (the criticism) gets so personal…”

All three members of The Bad Plus are earnest Midwestern jazz musicians who wound up in New York in the early ’90s, chasing the dream. Anderson and King had known each other since school days in Minnesota, while Iverson and Anderson met in the Big Apple. Playing with their own groups as sidemen and bandleaders through the ’90s, they eventually coalesced as The Bad Plus in 2000 and released their eponymous debut album on a Spanish label in 2001.

Steady gigging and strong word of mouth followed the band through its self-released 2002 effort, authorized bootleg, until Columbia finally stepped up with a deal for 2003’s These Are the Vistas.

Producer/engineer Tchad Blake (Pearl Jam, Los Lobos, Elvis Costello) has been at the helm for all the trio’s Columbia albums, and that’s been at the band’s request.

“We knew of him through his band The Latin Playboys, and when we signed we knew that someone at the label knew him. We’d heard he’d drop his salary if he really liked something, so we sent off a tape and he was really into it and we started immediately freaking out,” King says.

“The thing about him is the way he records. It’s a binaural process, done live, and it’s rare that a jazz record captures that feel and that vibe. That’s why we keep going back to him. Our records sound great with him. They dwarf the sounds of other records.”

And if some people out there don’t like the records? For them there’s only one response — too bad.