Out pours the Good & Plenty
I was skeptical about The Bad Plus before I heard them. Though they have a good name, favorable comparisons to jazz pianist Brad Mehldau and plenty of quirky cover choices to intrigue me, they also seemed to gain much of their attention because they, like Mehldau, are a bunch of young white guys playing jazz. This was praise was a little off-putting. (Or, as one of the ever-astute Amazon customers wrote, "I've always been wary of music critics. Trying to describe music by writing about it is like trying to create a charcoal drawing depicting a three-act play." Ah, very perceptive, Thomas F. Redmond from Cleveland. Here I was thinking it was like dancing about architecture.) Again like Mehldau, however, The Bad Plus are very, very good, and I think at least much of the attention has been well-deserved. A case in point is their recent album Give, which was co-produced by rock producer Tchad Blake. It's epic in a very modest way, veering off course unexpectedly and banging out codas after quiet interludes. There are covers of The Pixies' "Velouria", Ornette Coleman's "Street Woman" and, most notably, Black Sabbath's "Iron Man". My favorite, however, is:
"Picture our lonely VP rendered in papier-maché and filled with candy and treats instead of oil and defense contracts," writes the band in Give's liner notes. The song certainly sounds like a party of some kind, and I think many of us could "picture" attending a party dedicated to giving Mr. Halliburton a whack or two.
I like how the song has a kind of pop catchiness. It reminds me of Sonny Rollins' "St. Thomas" in that way. In fact, if you listen to both of them in a row, your brain will probably explode, which sounds like something the Bad Plus would write a song about.
See how things in jazz always come full circle?
Buy Give here.