I'm clearly not going to be able to transcribe my experience last week at the Knitting Factory. I'd be drafting this post forever. I'll just put it out there. In a word, phenomenal.
The Bad Plus is an acoustic jazz trio that performs like a rock band. They have, between the three of them, as much dynamic range as an orchestra. The amount of noise, control and wit they display is mind-boggling. At once you want to close your eyes and absorb it all, then you want to shout for them to play a favorite song, and then you want to stare with your mouth open. Then you look at the crowd and see if all the dudes are bopping their heads at the same rhythm that you're feeling. Yep.
I spent the better part of an hour mesmerized by drummer David King's acrobatics. Using everything from walkie-talkie feedback to tinkle toys, he extracts a pile of clinks, bumps and grinds from his kit that bring to mind the raving staccato of cups against bars in an asylum. His arms seem to be doing the rubber pencil trick. I've never seen cymbals go from full roar to silence in a fraction of a second and then back again in the next. He stands and slams the outside of the cymbals and a half second later he is seated at the hihat with all of the gongs silent, a half second later he's rubbing a stainless steel mixing bowl over the ribs of the kettle drum. What you hear in the end is extraordinary punctuation bracketing playful silences in the midst of Bad Plus music.
Ethan Iverson, the pianist, suited up, is playing as if he had an entire symphony behind him. He is at once completely in his own world of intricate melodies and in eerie synch with the band. He has a perfect sense of oblivion to the antics of his sidemen, and when watching the trio from behind him, stage left, you get a completely different sense of the band. He runs with his right hand and doesn't play left like a jazz pianist at all not that you'd hear much considering the prodigious work of the bassman, Reid Anderson who manages to hold all this wild energy together. As the writer of most of the material played, Reid knows what works and has an impressive sense of what these three can do.
I didn't hear my favorite of their tunes from their most recent albums 'Vistas' and "Give' which is called 'Dirty Blonde', but I recognized enough of what they did play to realize that what sounds unleahsed is actually very precise. In fact, when you really get to know the complications of their rhythmic interpretations you find that they are suggestive and playful almost to the point of silliness. They stretch everything beyond breaking with an almost cartoon physics, and yet without quite swinging, they rock. They literally rock.
It is in this that they are a phenomenon in the making. Their cover of 'We Are The Champions' is subtle, witty, melodic and punctuated with just the right reconstructions of their deconstructions. More of this will make them big stars.
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