Toronto – The Bad Plus is a contemporary jazz trio comprised of classically trained pianist Ethan Iverson, straight-up jazz bassist Reid Anderson, and rock drummer David King. They hail from the Midwest of America and formed in late 2000.
Although The Bad Plus plays a lot of great fresh, material, what have really put them on the jazz-map have been their covers. Taking popular music of the time and re-interpreting them as jazz songs has been standard technique in the jazz lexicon. But what makes The Bad Plus stand out is their ability to re-interpret a song, as opposed to just shoehorning it into a jazz vocabulary.
For their part, The Bad Plus certainly met my expectations of seeing a jazz band of the highest caliber playing together and having fun. This was my first time at the Glenn Gould studio, and I was very impressed with the acoustics. One of my favourite moments was when they played a rendition of Neil Young’s Heart of Gold and all stopped playing their instruments and sang in unison using very quiet indoor voices. The best part was that even at the back of the room, I could hear it perfectly.
4/5