Coffee With… The Bad Plus

Amplifier Magazine labeled them “the most distinctive three-piece outfit since Nirvana”; Rolling Stone called their sound “as badass as highbrow gets”; of course, I refer to Minnesota-born jazz outfit The Bad Plus. Making a name for themselves as the punk-rockers of traditional jazz (Hüsker Brübeck, if you will, although I suspect you won’t) by putting jazz spins on rock’s standards, their covers of Nirvana’s “Lithium” and Pixies’ “Velouria” are such a refreshing departure that they’re liable to make you forget the source material.

Their covers are almost as interesting as their original works, which take the form of beautifully-crafted – and often dizzyingly complex – attacks on the senses, that provide an easy way into real, honest-to-goodness jazz for people like me, e.g. people who typically imbibe music in two to three minute servings, and never really stray from the beaten path (and certainly never wander as far away from the path as the Bad Plus do). I was interested to see what kind of people square their sights on the punk-jazz market. I sat down with bassist Reid Anderson and drummer David King prior to their RNCM performance to pick the brains of modern jazz’s brightest sparks.

Making conversation with foreign musicians on the streets of Manchester is easy. With the Hacienda, the Ritz Ballroom, and the Factory Records office all within spitting distance (I hadn’t the heart to tell them what became of the Hacienda), the walk to the Cornerhouse – to make use of their cafe as an interview space – was more of a brief sightseeing tour for the duo, who expressed more than a passing interest in the notorious landmarks.

So where was pianist Ethan Iverson?

“He’s practicing,” revealed Dave, as he perched himself on one of the Cornerhouse’s miniscule leather pews. “It seems like he just practices this one piece we recorded two years ago. He still practices it several hours a day. We already recorded it, I don’t know what he’s trying to do. I think he wants to re-record it at some point.” This probably reveals more about Ethan than an interview would’ve.

At this juncture, Reid pulled the spoon from his espresso, ceasing the stirring momentarily to impart some worldly wisdom. “See this spoon? Just half of that with Nutella.”
“Oh yeah?”, enquired King. “That’s your new shit?”
“That’s my shit,” concluded Reid. Confused, I ask if the quiet bassist had taken to putting Nutella in his coffee. “No, no. It’s a little dessert. Just a little spoon like this, half of that with Nutella, a little bit of olive oil and some sea salt, it’s fantastic. You gotta try it.”

“It just seems so small, man.” David interjected, having clearly witnessed – possibly even tasted – this bizarre-sounding concoction. “You need about four or five of ‘em.” I had reservations, and questions. Would such a concoction even be sweet any more?

“It’s sweet, but the salt and olive oil… they’re distinctive flavours, but they go together quite well, I must say. Give it a shot.” He returns to his espresso, before a thought strikes him.

“You can always have another spoon if you want.”

Not convinced on the merits of the chocolate salt oil spoon, I decide to turn the topic to their music. Having been converted to traditional jazz fairly recently through The Bad Plus (after a jazz-loving friend sent me a CD containing their reboot of Nirvana’s “Lithium”), I asked how they felt about being a gateway to jazz for the uninitiated. They seemed flattered.

“Our whole energy is a celebration of improvised music, and anybody paying more attention to improvised music, or jazz, or whatever you wanna call it,” said Dave, Reid nodding along. “However you get there, we’re happy to be a part of that.”

So how much is improvised on record?

“Well, with our music, most of it is improvised,” said Anderson. “Like anything in jazz, you have a melody, and then you improvise and so forth. What we’re interested in is blurring the line – like if you listen to more traditional jazz where it’s like, ‘here’s the head, here’s the melody, here’s the improvisation’, we like it to be not quite so clear. Even though there’s just as much improvisation going on, we like it to be a more connected piece from beginning to end, rather than being like ‘this is the piano solo, and here’s the bass solo, and so on.”

“We tend to use different tools at different times,” added King. “We can use an avante-garde free thing, or odd timings, or something more strict, it’s like using the tools of our real-life experience rather than pretending we’re from just one school.”

For All I Care – their most recent outing – received some extremely positive reviews online, and not just from jazz aficionados; the first of their records to feature a singer (as well as the first to be comprised entirely of cover songs), the album was very well received. Was this something they were aware of? According to Dave King, apparently not.

“We hadn’t really noticed. It’s nice to hear it.” However, he acknowledged that the record was a departure for the group. “We’d done six studio albums and thought, ‘it might be nice to collaborate with somebody’, so we went all the way and got a singer, instead of, like, a saxophone player, or whatever. We toured that record a lot, and the response was great, but we never really noticed it. Every now and then we’ll be told of something either really bad, or really good, but we’re not paying too close attention to that. It can fuck with you. We appreciate being written about, but at the end of the day, we can’t change who we are.”

Reid seemed similarly unfazed by criticism, good or bad. “We’ve read our fair share of reviews, it really does mess with you – even the good reviews; it’s either too extreme, or it’s a good review but they don’t really understand what you were doing. We don’t really pay that stuff any attention.”

“We believe in what we’re doing,” King said. “We think there’s something there. It’s not the greatest thing ever, but it’s not total shit either.”

So how was the experience of recording For All I Care – and their departure from the norm, working with vocalist Wendy Lewis?

“Frankly, it was nice to have another person around after all these years of being a trio,” said Reid. “It couldn’t have been better.”

“I could see a volume two of that record with her,” King added; something to which I’m sure nobody would be opposed. “What was cool is that it remained our sound, we weren’t just backing up a singer. She wasn’t way out in front or anything, she was much more like an ensemble player. I remember we were doing this Wilco tune, it goes into these long improvisations, and she was just like…” at this point, King vacates his seat to take a knee on the Cornerhouse floor; he assumes a pose somewhat akin to The Thinker (if The Thinker had worn a wooly hat and had been covered in tattoos) and stays here for about five seconds, practically motionless. “She had this whole singer thing. It was totally cool.”

So does all this – all the touring, all the recording, all the kneeling by the side of the stage – does it all feel like a regular job to them now?

“We’ve done 9 to 5s,” said Dave, returning to his seat. “This may be cliché to say, but I’ve heard musicians say that what you’re paid for is the traveling. Sure, it’s 24 hours a day away from your home and family, and you can feel that as the weeks go by, but the show is always the relief; it’s almost like, ‘alright, I forgot why we’re out here.’”

Reid had similar thoughts on the matter. “And also, we didn’t have really have any opportunities to tour the world until we were all in our thirties; we don’t take it for granted. If you have a string of 5:30 wake-up calls, you can get worn down, but it doesn’t take long if you take a second to realize how lucky you are. Nobody tells us what to do, we’re not sidemen in some band we don’t like, this is our band, our music, and anybody who gets to do that has beaten some incredible odds.”

“Especially when it’s not commercial music,” adds King. “It’s a beautiful blessing, to be in somebody’s country and have somebody care. We spent most of our twenties, y’know, doing the underground thing, making records, playing New York, getting in the van, trying to get to Europe, and with this kind of music we’re lucky to be anywhere.”

This is the sentence I found interesting; if you didn’t know the Bad Plus were a jazz band, you certainly wouldn’t guess it from the sounds of their rise to power. Their touring ethos – getting in the van, releasing records themselves, playing dive bars – could have been ripped clean out of an Azzerad book. Although they are not a punk band (or even a punk band with jazz overtones, like Acoustic Ladyland) and their repertoire owes more to traditional jazz than the Dead Kennedys, do they recognize this punk-rock spirit in themselves?

“We feel a closeness to the energy of punk rock.” This is not a surprise coming from Dave; whereas Reid had a bit more of a librarian vibe, King looks more Black Flag than Thelonius Monk.

“When it comes to that, to touring, and getting in the van… that’s an important connection; we’re a ‘band’, and always have been, and that’s still not common in the world of jazz.” Reid continued: “We feel that’s really key; if it’s some guys who have barely played together, that’s fine, but that’s background music – if I’m going to care about a band, they have to have a sound that’s their own. In that sense, I think we’re really connected to punk rock, or indie, or whatever you wanna call that ethos.”

The Bad Plus admit that they’ve been extremely lucky to get to the position they’re in – I did wonder, however, what they could see themselves doing if they weren’t busy being an incredible jazz band. Having asked this question before, I expected the same answer – “nothing, I couldn’t be anything but a musician” – but I had obviously grossly underestimated the Bad Plus’ capacity for adaptation.

“I know immediately what I would do,” Dave blurted out without a second’s thought. “Probably interior decorator. I collect modern furniture. I got a bunch of decorating magazines in my bag all the time. I like interior design and things like that.” He exudes a sincerity and enthusiasm for this oeuvre that would be hard to synthesize, before conceding he may also pursue “some other form of creativity. Writing, or painting, or something. We all mess around with little things like that. Everyone does.”

“Yeah, something really impractical, like painting,” Reid nodded. Dave had other ideas.

“Fireman. You’d be a good fireman.”

“That’s what I wanted to be when I was quite young.”

Overcoming their urges to arrange furniture and put out fires, The Bad Plus managed to become a refreshing, progressive name in modern music – in light of this, I wondered what they would have to say about the changes underfoot in their current line of employment. Specifically, how people go and get their music.

The Bad Plus are extremely well represented on Spotify – the game-changing free music service that debuted last year – where all but one of their studio albums is available, in full, to enjoy for free, as well as their contributions to a handful of compilations and EPs. It’s all legal and paid for (using advertising revenue), but does this devalue their music?

Reid pauses on this. “On one hand it’s great, and very useful, to be able to check things out – people have been burnt too many times, paying eighteen bucks for a CD with one good track on it – but I don’t believe in it all being free; it’s absurd, and it’s not sustainable. Music has a value in people’s lives that material things don’t, like a T-shirt. They feel like they possess it in a way that’s different from other things, and that’s the beauty of it. But I don’t walk into a store and demand a T-shirt for free.” He sips on his espresso momentarily, before adding – “and if I did, we wouldn’t have T-shirts.”

“If we sell records, it enables a record label to get on the phone and try and get people interested when we visit a city,” Dave says plainly. “That’s basically the service we’re paying for when we hand our records over to these labels. We’ve done the DIY record thing, but the difference is having some people – in the sea of music out there – getting people interested in your gig. And that’s what a record label can do for you. That’s how we make our living, playing live, and that’s how we’ll connect most to people. Ultimately, jazz, improvised music, it’s really ‘live’ music – in the room, it can be a heavy thing; making the record is almost just so we can get out here.”

Reid gets the last, eloquent word on the matter. “There’s a whole industry that’s trying to sort this out, so it’s not really our job, but – and I think most music lovers do this – if you love a band, and you love music, y’know, just buy the record. It’s not that much money, usually. We don’t make any money from record sales, but it enables us to keep going, and keep making music, and keep touring. I think there needs to be some basic recognition of that. It sustains something you care about. That’s the way the world’s going too; if you want to eat organic foods, you go to the store and buy them, you don’t buy mass-produced, processed foods. Same thing with music.”

On that note, I shook their hands, thanked them sincerely for their time, and told them how much I looked forward to their show that evening at the RNCM (while subtly enquiring – with entirely selfish motivations – as to whether or not Heart Of Glass still appears on the setlist, a question that was met with an air of coy uncertainty). The Bad Plus clearly care a great deal about what they do, and I was eager to go and see them – partly because I had never seen a jazz band play live before, but mostly to see the pair, joined by their enigmatic pianist, practicing what they had so cheerfully preached over coffee.

I was stunned. Ten minute solos, music that seems to reach for miles, complete disassociation before a galloping shift back into synchronicity, The Bad Plus’ live experience is something I cannot really review honestly, as I have nothing even remotely similar in my own personal history with which to compare it with. And frankly, I’m glad. It was an eye-opener of the best kind, and I left feeling better for having seen them. They even played Heart Of Glass (proof, if proof was needed, that the Bad Plus are not just phenomenally talented musicians, but bloody nice blokes).

It is not often I am so utterly blindsided by a live performance these days, and it was immensely refreshing – even the etiquette of a jazz performance was new to me, where people will enthusiastically clap after a long and mind-bending solo, often clapping at three or four points per piece (something I got behind with gusto). I thought I’d seen the full spectrum of band performance – acoustic guitars on stools, forty piece brass bands blazing their way through military standards, ten-piece Canadian indie outfits, choirs, New Zealand punks running through uninterested crowds in a deliberate attempt to cause mayhem; I thought I’d seen the lot. But The Bad Plus experience is one that I can heartily recommend to anybody, if only because it is almost certainly not being replicated anywhere else in the world.

Do check out the Bad Plus. Keep an eye on them, and go and see them if you get the chance. Especially if you’ve reached the point where you think you’ve seen or heard it all. If anybody can convince you otherwise, it’s The Bad Plus.

John Tucker