The Bad Plus are a jazz trio

When your roommate asks you what you’re doing on your way to the Bad Plus, you’ll have to say, “I’m going to see a jazz trio.” You’ll probably mislead your roommate into thinking you dig shit like Kenny G, Michael Bublé or Pat Metheny. But what else can you say?

The Bad Plus don’t sing, they’re all about improvisation and they play traditional jazz instruments (piano, upright bass and drum kit). They’re jazz. Even if drummer Dave King is loath call himself a jazz drummer.

“I want to protect myself ascetically because I don’t want people to picture me playing at a Sheraton hotel,” King told me. “It’s like what they say, ‘A million cocktail musicians have destroyed what a few geniuses created.’”

The trio’s doesn’t swing or bop, but it’s also not Phishy or (too) reminiscent of Medeski, Martin & Wood. King and bassist Reid Anderson grew up listening to classic rock (pianist Ethan Iverson we’ll get to later, that guy's a friggin' nut), but there’s no fusion rock feel to the Bad Plus.

Instead, like experimentalists Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, the Bad Plus create new music (which we still gotta call jazz, because, as previously mentioned, what the fuck else can we call it).

“We truly feel like we’re the most honest jazz group out there because we’re not pretending to be Miles Davis,” says King. “We’re playing from the truest part of ourselves. When you hear us you can feel that we’re dedicated to it. I would question whether you can feel the same thing when you hear Wynton Marsalis play.

“You can hear that he loves jazz, but can you hear another motive too? Is he doing it to steer peoples’ opinions about what jazz is and what jazz isn’t? His playing just seems loaded with all this other bullshit.”

And here’s where the diatribe begins. Like some kind of jazz Robert Moses, Marsalis has spent his career reconstructing the music’s history to fit his vision, which starts with Dixieland and ends with Kind of Blue. Meanwhile, King has spent his career pissing on Marsalis’ reconstruction.

“The irony is that we all grew up loving those early Wynton records,” he says - and he's right to say it, the early Wynton records are as good as Davis in 1963. “But that was before he made ten billion dollars trying to steer the entire jazz education program to his direction and became a zealot who wouldn’t let anything new in…But you know when Wynton is all alone in his apartment he’s cranking up Led Zeppelin. I’ll guarantee it. You don’t think his drummer Jeff Watts loves John Bonham? You put on ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and Watts is going ape shit. But can he tell Wynton he digs it, or that he digs Radiohead, and keep his gig? I don’t know.”

While King thinks the new traditionalists attempt to keep jazz pure is moronic, he and his band have been accused using jazz’s oldest gimmick -- covering rock tunes -- to draw in listeners. On every one of their albums there’s a cover that could be considered a pander or ironic or both, including “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Heart of Glass,” “Iron Man” and “Chariots of Fire.”

King says the covers aren’t jokes. Jazz is about taking on standards, but the Bad Plus don’t see a point in doing the hundredth version of “Straight, No Chaser.” So they starting doing rock tunes with worthy melodies -- or tunes that confounded pianist Ethan Iverson (now more on the group's friggin' nuts-o).

“Ethan’s a different kind of guy,” says King. “He listened to Art Tatum religiously when he was 13-years-old, he wrote a tune called ‘Modern’ in fifth grade, he wore a suit to school from second grade until he graduated from high school.”

When the trio first began playing together, King and bassist Reid Anderson began brainstorming rock tunes to cover. When Iverson revealed he’d never heard the Who, the two began digging into Iverson’s rock ignorance.

“Jokingly we suggested Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and he asked, ‘Who is that?” says King. “We knew we had to do it because we knew Ethan would approach the song the same way he’d approach Stravinsky.”

Since recording “Teen Spirit,” the band’s tastes (and ambition) have expanded. It probably pisses off Wynton but earlier this year they did six-night stint at jazz’s most legendary venue, the Village Vanguard. Last month they performed a seven-movement score with the Mark Morris Modern Dance Group. This week they’re releasing their new album produced by Tony Platt (who ran the boards for tons of rock records including Back in Black, Foreigner’s 4 and albums by Iron Maiden, Cheap Trick and Motorhead).

“If you get past the press blurb about how we play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ and you actually check out what we’re doing you’ll see we’re true to it,” says King. “We’re interested in improvised music that has no stylist boundaries so we’re going to confuse people that want to hold on to boundaries.”

In other words, they’re a jazz trio.