The Bad Plus Brings their Eclectic Sound to Binghamton

When I first saw The Bad Plus at the Endicott Performing Arts Center in March of 2004, I was prepared to be underwhelmed. On the otherwise bare stage was a man in front of a baby grand piano, another jockeying an upright bass, and still another behind a drum kit.

My attitude about them changed considerably once their performance was over.

The Bad Plus - Ethan Iverson (piano), Reid Anderson (bass), and Dave King (drums) - have been playing together since the late 1980s. The trio hails from Minneapolis, Minnesota (the city that gave us Prince), though Iverson is originally from Ohio. I recently spoke with Iverson via email.

“The three of us share a common 'tribal language',” said Iverson of the band’s upbringing in America's heartland. “Growing up, we drank the same economy-size Mountain Dew from [the Midwestern convenience store chain] SuperAmerica, saw the same bad movies on channel nine, heard the same great rock radio on KQRS, and learned about jazz from going to the Dakota Jazz Club in St. Paul. This Midwestern heritage is not as obviously deep as that of, say, New Orleans or Senegal, but it has its own twisted charm.”

“The first time The Bad Plus played together,” Iverson continues, “We were not called The Bad Plus. We were just teenagers trying to play jazz standards in the living room of Reid’s family’s house in Golden Valley, Minnesota. Reid Anderson and David King had been best friends since the age of thirteen. I was younger by two years and had met Reid when he went to college in Wisconsin.

“When Reid put us together in his mother’s house that day in 1990," he confesses, “well, let’s just say the results were less than magical. We would have been shocked had you told us that fifteen years later we would be a full-time band!”

How did they come to be called The Bad Plus? “After taking a decade to develop as players, the three of us came back together and played a gig in Minneapolis. It immediately felt special, so Dave came up with the name ‘The Bad Plus’ (it doesn't mean anything), and we booked some more gigs.”

After several gigs under that name, they recorded an eponymous album. “The Bad Plus was for a small Spanish label called Fresh Sound/New Talent. Right after Christmas 2000 we went into a studio in Minneapolis for our first recording session. We set up, got sounds, and tracked the whole thing in about six hours while a blizzard raged outside. In true Midwestern style, our first step after recording our first CD was digging our cars out from under two feet of snow.”

The pianist goes on: “Next, we pressed a thousand copies of a live show in New York and called it Authorized Bootleg. These two small records had some impact, and led indirectly to the band’s being signed to Sony/Columbia by Yves Beauvais.” The Bad Plus continued to record for Columbia until 2005, producing These Are the Vistas, Give and Suspicious Activity? In 2007, they recorded the album Prog for the Heads-Up label. They've also recorded for e1 Entertainment, Sony Masterworks, Nonesuch and Okeh/Sony labels.

The group is currently touring to support their latest recorded effort, It's Hard, an album of all covers – Prince, Johnny Cash, Kraftwerk, Ornette Coleman and Cyndi Lauper to name just a few. “Since Louis Armstrong, there has been a tradition of playing covers in jazz. Of course, they aren't called 'covers,' they are called 'standards,' but the principle is exactly the same: you take some popular song of the day and improvise on it. Before jazz, classical composers would make variations on famous opera arias. It's too bad we don't have a recording of Mozart, Beethoven, or Liszt improvising on the latest hit song at a party.” He explains, “With the rare exception, The Bad Plus doesn't choose to improvise on music written from 1920 to 1965. Instead, we find it really interesting to search for ways to make rock, pop, and electronica songs vehicles for contemporary improvisation. One reason that this material is not ‘standard’ is that you can't call 'Iron Man' at a jam session and pull off a mediocre interpretation of it the way you can with 'All the Things You Are.' There simply isn't a common language for it. “Also, there is undeniably audience outreach, whether it's Miles playing 'My Funny Valentine,' Coltrane playing 'My Favorite Things,' or The Bad Plus playing 'Smells Like Teen Spirit’.”

The Bad Plus are nothing if not eclectic. The video of their version of Kraftwerk's “The Robots” live in Leipzig couldn't have possibly worked in theory, but the band made it work, and work well. Their take on Johnny Cash's I Walk The Line on It's Hard goes all over the place with its tempo. It slows down, speeds up, and features strategically-placed wrong notes. Their reading of Peter Gabriel's Games Without Frontiers features deliberate moments of clever atonality. That seems to be one of The Bad Plus' signature approaches to arranging covers.

“We love modernist classical music,” remarks Iverson, “that’s part of our sound.”

The bands next-to-most-recent album, The Bad Plus Joshua Redman was an album of originals, featuring Redman on saxophone. I asked Iverson how his band got together with him, and what it was like working with him.

“We just sit back and listen to him blow beautifully. In some ways it does change our music into 'jazz' more than usual. But Josh is very open. We love Josh, also all three of us played with his dad Dewey a little bit.”

The Bad Plus' album Made Possible featured Anderson on synths and other electronics and King on electronic drums. It adds an element of mystery but doesn't change the band's fundamental sound. Anderson’s love of electronics, which feature in his own music, inspired the addition of choice of instruments on this album.

Finally, I asked Mr. Iverson what his band has in store for the Binghamton audience. “We are just lucky to be out here on tour!”

The Bad Plus are playing the Osterhout Concert Theater in The Anderson Center at Binghamton University on Sunday, April 2nd at 4pm. Tickets may be purchased at the box office Monday through Friday from noon until 5:30 PM, by phone at (607) 777-ARTS, or online at binghamton.edu/anderson-center.