The Bad Plus Joshua Redman
@ the Love Supreme Jazz Festival
4 July 2015

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Biography

In 2011, The Bad Plus invited saxophonist Joshua Redman to join them for a week of enthusiastically received performances at the Blue Note in New York City. They then played a handful of dates before heading into the studio last year to record their debut album, “The Bad Plus Joshua Redman,” which Nonesuch Records released in May 26, 2015.

The Bad Plus is a jazz trio from the United States, consisting of pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer Dave King, originating from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Bad Plus came together at the end of the 20th century and has avoided easy categorisation ever since, garnering critical acclaim and a legion of fans worldwide with their creativity, idiosyncratic personality, and flair for live performance. Based in New York City, the deeply collaborative trio constantly searches for rules to break and boundaries to cross, bridging genres and techniques while exploring infinite possibilities of three exceptional musicians working in perfect sync.

“This is a band with three leaders,” Iverson says. “No single person has the final say. The stuff that gets played at gigs and makes it onto the records has been vetted by three very opinionated guys - and that keeps the music fresh. This is a fairly unique thing in the improvisational music landscape.”

The Bad Plus has a well-earned reputation for daring deconstruction, pushing the limits on what is expected of a piano-bass-drums trio. The past 15 years have seen the genre-smashing band creating a distinctive repertoire of inventive and exciting original music, along with iconoclastic covers of artists as divergent as Nirvana and Neil Young, Aphex Twin and Ornette Coleman. Earlier this year, the acclaimed trio took on one of the most influential works of the 20th century, Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (Sony Masterworks).

“The Rite of Spring” took a lot of thought and energy,” says Anderson. “The next project definitely needed to be a set of original music.”

Produced by The Bad Plus at The Terrarium in Minneapolis in the winter of 2014, “Inevitable Western” carries on the trio’s commitment to what they’ve dubbed ‘avant-garde populism’ - the idea that serious music can be as engaging and accessible as it is forward-thinking and provocative. New pieces like Iverson’s odd time romp, “Mr. Now” and Anderson’s polyrhythmic “I Hear You” are lithe and inventive while never veering so far out into the wilderness as to lose their melodic purpose and human heart.

King suggests The Bad Plus is a “mixed media band at heart,” noting, “We have conversations which are so stimulating as if we’re in an art salon. I’ve never experienced that in other bands. In The Bad Plus, we’ll talk about a conductor or symphony for hours and then switch over to muscle car films from the 60s. In our music, we believe high and low can be mixed together without seeming precious.”

A genuinely leaderless trio, The Bad Plus is equal in every respect, from composition to performance to production. The interplay between these collaborators has marked the group’s work from the jump, infusing it with carefully considered spontaneity, subtlety, style, and depth.

“There’s still tons to do,” says King. “We feel every record we put out is better than the last - and when that stops, that’s when we take a long look at each other.”

Biography edited by Robin Francis
for Michael Valentine Studio Ltd.