THE BAD PLUS
PROG

Four years ago, The Bad Plus released These Are The Vistas, their first recording for the venerable Columbia label. With a sound more akin to a rock and roll assault than to the politeness of a jazz piano trio, with influences ranging from Stravinsky to Ornette Coleman, and a repertoire blending diverse original material and provocative covers of Nirvana and Aphex Twin, The Bad Plus earned a reputation as one of the most forward-thinking groups in music.

Produced by Tchad Blake, among the most innovative engineers of the last 20 years, it sounded like no other jazz recording. Championed by mainstream rock press, reviled by jazz purists, hailed by others as music's great hope, Vistas was embraced here and abroad.  The group became staples at NPR and college radio and developed a strong presence on the international concert circuit, playing more than 170 shows in 2006 alone.

Four years and two more landmark Blake-produced albums later (2004's Give and 2005's Suspicious Activity?), The Bad Plus turned the page with their newest release, PROG.  An excitingly mature and exhilarating album, PROG is the work of a band in clear control of their musical intentions, their sound, and their business.  It is at once a new beginning and a confirmation of past promise.

Joining The Bad Plus camp is English über-engineer/mixer Tony Platt -- best known for recording and mixing AC/DC's classic Back In Black along with his work for Bob Marley, the Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin -- who engineered and co-produced PROG over a two-week period last fall in Minnesota.  In sharp contrast to Blake's deliberately low-fi approach, Platt created a recording which is truer to the band's live sound.

The Bad Plus tackle four covers: Tears For Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule The World" and Burt Bacharach's "This Guy's In Love With You" plus massively deconstructed versions of Rush's "Tom Sawyer" and David Bowie's "Life On Mars."  As is now a Bad Plus tradition, the covers frame the band’s original compositions, including the stunning new ballad, "Giant," the intricately angular "Mint,"and the final installment in their tribute to athleticism, "1980 World Champion."

Regardless of the repertoire performed, the band is simply breathtaking.  Favoring group improvisation over individual solos, eschewing all jazz cliches, The Bad Plus rip into each set with a combination of Swiss-watch precision, the spectrum of dynamics and reckless abandon.  

The Bad Plus is a collective made up of bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson, and drummer David King.  All three are from the Midwest and they have known each other since their teens.  Nonetheless, with the exception of one unimpressive meeting in 1990, it is only after spending their formative 20s apart  -- King as a session player in Los Angeles, Iverson as the musical director for the prestigious Mark Morris Dance Group, Anderson as a prominent up-and-coming player on the New York jazz scene -- that they reunited in late 2000 to play a weekend club date in Minneapolis.  The chemistry was immediate and obvious.  They planned a second gig and a one-day recording session for the indie jazz label Fresh Sound and The Bad Plus was born.

On this same first gig, the nascent group played their first rock cover, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Thus began The Bad Plus trademark of complementing original repertoire with their takes on mainstream pop  “standards” including ABBA, Black Sabbath, the Bee Gees, Queen, Blondie, Aphex Twin, Neil Young, and Bjork.

While the covers helped to spread their reputation, they comprise less than 20% of the band's live repertoire.  Anderson, Iverson, and King are all superb composers in their own right, each boasting  a distinctive style.  Iverson’s music is the more intellectual and complex, Anderson's the more melodic and romantic, and King’s the more rhythmic and surreal.

###

The three members of The Bad Plus tackled a wide range of topics in recent conversations following the completion of PROG.  Here are some of the highlights of these talks:

DAVID -- When we met at 15, Reid and I were leaning toward progressive rock and some fusion stuff.  But by the next year we were deeply entrenched in Coltrane and free jazz. We'd go to every concert that came to town.   High school was the transition from prog-rock to free jazz and bebop and everything.

ETHAN --   I was in a hermetically sealed chamber in high school.    I wasn't interested in classical music or rock and roll or anything but jazz. First I loved boogie woogie, then early jazz. Eventually I got my first Monk record and that really made an impression and I slowly started to figure out Miles Davis.  When I met Reid at 16 or 17, I had a strong interest in free jazz-- so my history of jazz is that of jazz history.    

REID -- Dave and I met in 1986 when I went to try out a bass amp at his house. We've been friends ever since.  We bonded over the music that we liked.  We both could play already.  When you're that age, you're looking for other kids who can play.  From that moment on we were inseparable.  I met Ethan in 1989 when I spent one year in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, going to the university there.  He was a high school kid at the time.   We became friends and made music together as much as we could.  

ETHAN -- We were all so determined to be individuals that we didn't have a common perspective yet.

DAVID -- Ethan came in as a heavily opinionated cat.  I was into the ironic late 80s downtown thing.  Reid has always been in the middle.  It was a fun session but that was it.    

REID -- We were young and completely inexperienced and we were fighting.  It was uneventful except for the fact we're still playing together. 

REID -- We came together as mature musicians and three leaders with some pretty definable sounds, even at that point.  It was clear to me that we had found what we wanted to do.

ETHAN --  We put together a gig with the three of us.  And from the first set, I felt that here was a way of playing very high level music that didn't really reference normal jazz. I've always tried to be a musician that knew jazz but didn't play normal jazz.  It never occurred to me that rock would be part of the solution.

DAVID -- We got together for this gig in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I was living. The response and our connection were very strong.  There was an immediate feeling like the temperature had changed.   A few weeks later I came up with the name The Bad Plus and we booked our next gig.  

DAVID -- Ethan at first was very shy about it because he doesn't know any rock music. We mentioned "Smells Like Teen Spirit." He’d never heard of it,  and a light bulb went on.   Reid and I could approach this material with honesty and our memories of cruising along with our chicks and Ethan could approach it like he does --  like an android.

REID -- Dave and I had been talking about this idea since we were kids, fantasizing about how cool it would be to be in an improvising band that played Led Zeppelin. 

ETHAN -- There was a practical consideration.  While we were all writing, it didn't mean we could figure out two sets of original music for the first gig.  That's what jazz musicians always do: They have a couple of new tunes and fill out the set with standards and blues.  When we needed two sets in The Bad Plus, one of them suggested playing a rock cover.  I never liked it when jazz musicians play rock tunes, but since it felt like a collective already, I said to myself, "What the hell, I'll go down with a sinking ship for one song, who cares?"  

DAVID -- Playing covers never has been a gimmick.  It starts as a tune we like.  We don't believe that music has to end with Cole Porter and George Gershwin.  Arranging and playing covers sharpens our knives.   Every one of them has its own flow, a very unique arrangement, and is approached with a different palette.   

ETHAN -- Once we actually started doing it I could immediately feel the energy, the heat from the idea.  And of course later on I realized that whenever I heard jazz musicians play rock tunes they treated them as if they were playing a jazz standard from the 40's.  The musical materials that we have always used while playing the rock songs are more out of the avant-garde…our harmonic approach comes more from Stravinsky than Bill Evans, so somehow our treatments of rock and pop are starker and have more strength.

REID -- The covers give us an incredible amount of freedom because they're very sturdy structures to hang our sound on; to support the intentions of The Bad Plus.   When we do a cover it becomes our music, in a way.  

COMPOSING

ETHAN -- The first piece of music that I wrote is preserved in a musical notebook from 5th grade.   It's called "Modern."  Composition is something I have talent for, but here everyone is such a good composer that I take a little bit of a backseat. There is no requirement for me to come up with a bunch of stuff.  I could never write as good a melody as Reid can so there's no point in competing there.  I can write endless amounts of music on demand but it's nice that in The Bad Plus I don't have to.

REID -- I think I was afraid to start composing.  Once I did, at 27, it felt like I knew what I wanted to do.  I can definitely stand behind the first pieces I wrote.   I had been carrying a sound in my head for a while and then, finally, out it came. 

DAVID -- Of the three of us as a composer, Reid has the most detailed aesthetic.  He is basically a frustrated pop songwriter. He can write some incredibly complicated music, but he really is a pop songwriter that plays bass.

REID –Regardless of the fact that we play in a band together, Ethan and Dave are two of my favorite composers from our generation.  In that respect it’s very powerful for us to be a committed band because it keeps things in perspective.  The bar is always very high in terms of what you need to deliver.

REID -- A big part of our sound is our equality within the band.  Each one of us is playing music we have a stake in.  It's group music - music that only sounds like the three of us.  There’s a basic level of trust.  Not only of trusting that everybody's taking care of business at every moment, but that your own ideas are going to be treated with respect and also confronted by exceptional imaginations. 

ETHAN --  Three factors make our sound:  first, all three instruments are upfront in the mix.  That's the most important thing.   Then the harmony is basically simple to begin with.  We use complex harmony but our starting point is almost always one of simple harmonic clarity.  The third would be our tremendous rhythmic acuity, especially from Dave. 

DAVID -- There is deep personal freedom involved.  There is the idea that you can bring personal esthetics together and create a new one.  There's no bending to the will but there's also a deep trust and support.  But it's a strange, invisible line that none of us fully understands: three alpha personalities coming together and expressing what we want in the moment but also caring about each other beyond the normal thing.  It's like riding on something that's bigger than you.  This band is about embracing that kind of energy;  being able to say things like that with a straight face.   We believe in the human spirit, in the idea that there is so much weight to intention.  Unapologetic intention. We put our full weight behind every idea.  We believe in every minute of  it.  

DAVID --- In this band irony exists much less then people think.  There is very little irony.   We're  hearing the beauty of the music and our intent is very serious and very strong.   When we play Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" we're not winking.  Black Sabbath is the shit.  You put a Black Sabbath record on and in their genre it's like putting a Coltrane record on.  It's the real deal.  To us it's not funny.  We are not in the business of smart-ass music.

REID – Nothing is ever played with an ironic intent.  I hate ironic music. If irony is ever a part of our music, it only exists as part of a much more complex emotion which is ultimately not ironic.  We deliver our music with absolute earnestness, always.

ETHAN -- There is no way we can claim that there is no irony in The Bad Plus, because there is.  It's just that we mean it, too.  That's the problem. Let's look at Tom Sawyer:  the outrageousness of what we're doing is certainly informed by the knowledge of transgression.  For me, the type of irony that we're going for is like Nabokov, where some new piece of art is formed on the ruins of a lot of knowledge and deep irony. But we mean "Tom Sawyer." We mean "Iron Man".  It's for real.  

REID -- The existence of this band is not dependent on any kind of record label.  We're here to make and play our music.  When we didn't have a record label anymore we took out a bank loan and called on a lot of favors.   We underwrote our first gigs ourselves and this is along the same lines. It's all mathematics. 

ETHAN -- If the Columbia relationship could have continued in a sensible way, we would have enjoyed putting out a long line of great Columbia records like Glenn Gould or Miles Davis. It's a label with an incredible legacy.  However, when Suspicious Activity? came out with the anti-piracy software on it, that dealt a mortal blow to our fantasy relationship with Columbia.  That was a moment when I felt, "I would do anything to be off the label right now."   And we all said, let's not wait around and do another mating dance with another company. Let's just make a record and then try to sell it.

DAVID --  We had a great experience at Sony.  But the spyware and the lack of a real plan for Suspicious Activitity? made us feel like we needed to be more in control of the mechanisms that make a record go out.  

ETHAN -- We were fortunate in a way at Columbia because, thanks to our A&R man over there, we didn't have too much meddling going on. But if we'd signed with another major from the ground up, I would dread taking that first meeting about what the next record would be.  It would be such a pain in the ass.   You know you don't want to hear a single opinion from those guys. 

REID -- It's clearly a reference to that music, prog-rock.  But to me prog-rock always meant re-imagining rock music, whether the end result was good or bad.   Those bands  were pushing the boundaries as far as they could.  That's what we try to do, that's our MO.  In a sense there's a kinship we feel with that music, not to mention that Dave and I grew up listening to it.  But  “prog” also ties in with the idea of progressive ideas, progress.  It's all those things.  

ETHAN -- "prog" means progressive.  It's not prog-rock or prog-jazz.  The point about “prog” is people trying to create something new from what they know.  This record does not sound like Yes or King Crimson.   There is no irony in the title.  It's very bold.

DAVID -- Reid and I come from the school of prog-rock and we can hold our own talking prog-rock with anybody.  A lot of it is horrible when you look back.  Our  music has been touched by progressive music whether it's prog-rock or jazz. We felt it was time to put a word out there that describes where we're coming from.

DAVID -- Production-wise, the goal was to be truer  to our live sound.  Tony was able to coax that out.   We wanted to shake our hair, shake the molecules, shake up the sound.

ETHAN -- There is no more hardcore improvising on our new record than on “Life On Mars.”  It's almost just like pure free jazz, although Reid and I have some distant idea of what the chord structure is.  It's a way of playing I'm intensely proud of. Basically playing free but within a structure.  

REID -- PROG is a true record.  It represents us with great clarity, unfiltered.   The sound of the other records was bigger than life because that’s what we wanted at the time.  This time around, it’s more naked, somehow.

# # #

For more information, please contact:

Ken Weinstein
Big Hassle Media
212-619-1360

or

Mike Wilpizeski
Heads Up International
718-459-2117