The Bad Plus’s Border Dance Around Tradition

Kevin Holm-Hudson, University of Kentucky

In 1992, free-jazz guitarist Derek Bailey observed that jazz “now seems capable

of only looking backwards… The few surviving originators, musicians once justly

renowned for their adventurousness and musical vision, are now celebrated… as

the guardians of a tradition. Meanwhile, much of the music is represented by a

host of younger players who have also, it seems, taken on the curatorship of

‘their’ tradition” (49). Bailey’s critique does not name “head curator” Wynton

Marsalis, but it is safe to say that Marsalis’s prominence and educational

advocacy had by 1992 already contributed to the perception of mainstream jazz

as a “museum culture”—an image cemented by Marsalis’s Lincoln Center Jazz

Orchestra and Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series Jazz. As Frank Zappa

famously observed, “Jazz isn’t dead—it just smells funny.”

This increasingly circumscribed—and circumspect—image of mainstream

jazz confirms Simon Frith’s (1996) model of “genre worlds” in the music industry.

Once a particular musical style seems to emerge from the “ground up,” as it

were, the industry isolates certain marketable features of that style and presents

it as a marketing category. One need only consider the case of the independent

Seattle scene in the early 1990s, for example, and the industry’s genre

construction of “grunge”; after the surprise success of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and

Alice in Chains were aggressively marketed with big promotion budgets, while

bands such as The Posies and Sky Cries Mary were quickly dropped by their

labels after releasing one or two albums with minimal promotion.

Jazz, on the other hand, has traditionally been shaped by a kind of artist-

driven shaping of its genre borders, albeit with the blessing of the recording

industry that sees fit to document and distribute players’ efforts. Consider the

genre border expansion that happened from 1959 to 1961: In 1959, Miles Davis

restructured the jazz chart as a springboard for modal exploration in Kind of Blue.

John Coltrane took this approach one step further with his version of “My Favorite

Things” the following year, in which the structure of the Rodgers and

Hammerstein show tune was itself deconstructed, Coltrane’s version focusing

almost hypnotically on the verse alone. In 1961, Davis saw Coltrane’s adaptation

of a non-standard show tune and veered one step toward kitsch with his

straightforward rendition of the Disney tune “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

Meanwhile, Ornette Coleman blasted through formal barriers altogether with the

one-two punch of The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz. Certainly the

visionary efforts of these musicians, however, was aided by the equally visionary

aesthetic of music industry “gatekeepers” such as Ahmet Ertegun and Teo

Macero; while Davis, Coltrane and Coleman were the pathfinders, Macero and

Ertegun could be seen as the surveyors, seeing to it that the borders were

acknowledged.

Which brings us to the critical and commercial success of Marsalis, his

articulate, opinionated pronouncements on the cultural importance of jazz and,

indeed, what was or was not jazz in the first place, and the more profit-driven

motives of Columbia (now CBS)’s new owners, Sony. These factors shaped a set

of very conservative “genre borders” around jazz in the 1980s and 1990s. Janus-

like, jazz continually looked backward as it released new product.

Outside the borders, an altogether more ironic form of jazz’s backward

glances began to take shape in the late 1970s, notably through the New York

“fake jazz” band The Lounge Lizards. Formed by saxophone player John Lurie

(who wrote most of the group’s material), the band’s original line-up included

drummer Anton Fier (formerly of New Jersey band The Feelies and later of Pere

Ubu) and ex-DNA guitarist Arto Lindsay. Their self-titled debut album was

released in 1981, the same year Marsalis released his first album as a band

leader.

The Lounge Lizards’ punk-jazz hybrid lineage—while closely aligned with

the “no-wave” underground art-rock scene centered in downtown New York, their

debut album was produced by Teo Macero—reveals much about their artistic

aims. The album opens with the Lurie-composed “Incident on South Street,” a

Mancini-esque film-noir chart with a swaggering riff that is soon undermined by

Lindsay’s guitar “solo.” The “solo” is atonal, ametric and amotivic—one is

reminded of the critical metaphor of John Coltrane’s solos as “sheets of sound,”

but here we might rather compare Lindsay’s solo to the “process-based” molten-

lead castings of Richard Serra, notes splattered in gobs all over the master tape.

Jazz purists hated the album. They also hated the way the group sullied a

smoky rendition of Duke Ellington’s “Harlem Nocturne” with the addition of Farfisa

organ, or transformed Thelonious Monk’s “Well You Needn’t” and “Epistrophy”

into cacophonous melees recognizable only by the melodic contour of the “head.”

Lindsay and Fier left soon after the first album, taking much of the group’s ironic

attitude with them; the group’s last album, Voice of Chunk, was released in 1988.

One year later, the members of The Bad Plus—Ethan Iverson (piano), Reid

Anderson (bass), and Dave King (drums)—first played together.

Unlike the Lounge Lizards, who seemed to critique jazz clichés from

“outside” the genre borders of jazz (the post-industrial lofts of the downtown New

York scene), the Bad Plus self-consciously dance about jazz’s genre borders,

ever shifting them in the process. Their live performances present their

somewhat conflicted image: Everson, impeccably dressed in a suit and sporting

horn-rimmed glasses, announces the pieces to the audience with a calm, studied

diffidence that suggests the cool intellectualism of Bill Evans. King, on the other

hand, is in appearance every bit a grunge rocker, clad in flannel shirt and knit

cap, capable of instantly shifting from swing-jazz cymbal rides to an all-out

assault on all parts of the kit (playing the drum shells as well as the heads).

Anderson, placed between them on the stage, appears the nervous go-between,

shifting allegiances stylistically between the one and the other. It is Anderson,

more than the others, who seems to be negotiating the genre borders in stage

performance.

While The Bad Plus’s self-consciously retro image—a throwback to the

white shirts and narrow ties of the Lounge Lizards—provides an ironic

iconography for post-bop jazz’s “hipster” or “beat” connotations, their repertoire

dares to allow a new set of “standards” into the canon—much as Miles Davis and

Coltrane had before them. Miles, remember, was responsible for putting

“Someday My Prince Will Come,” Crosby Stills and Nash’s “Guinnevere,” Cyndi

Lauper’s “Time After Time,” and Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” onto

ostensibly jazz recordings.

Following in this tradition, The Bad Plus have recorded Nirvana’s “Smells

Like Teen Spirit,” Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” and a

number of other classic and not-so-classic rock songs. Iverson remarks, “TBP

enjoys playing covers… Playing covers helped us to get some press in the early

days. It also caused consternation in certain dusty corners of the jazz community

that have little regard for rock. In other dusty corners, people think we are

naughty jazz nerds who enjoy poking fun at Blondie…, Black Sabbath…, or

Rush” (Iverson, 44). For example, jazz critic Bill Milkowski has described the

band as “the piano trio that Schroeder from the Peanuts gang would eventually

front in his 20s after growing up in the East Village and running into rebellious

lads who introduce him to the music of Nirvana, Aphex Twin and the Foo

Fighters” (Mitchell, 29).

Responding to such criticisms, Iverson writes, “the simple truth about

TBP’s covers is this: we like playing these songs! We would play them even if

they got no press at all, and we aren’t sending them up. After all, improvisers

since the beginning of time have enjoyed taking apart famous music to see what

new complex emotions can be found” (Iverson, 44). Drummer King concurs:

“Playing covers has never been a gimmick. It starts as a tune we like. We don’t

believe 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.” (Mitchell, 29).

Which brings us to the rock songs in The Bad Plus’s set list. Interestingly,

each of the songs is distinguished by its motivic character—the three-note

melodic cell of “We Are the Champions,” the terse riff of “Iron Man,” the relentless

four-chord ostinato that builds through the verse and chorus of “Smells Like Teen

Spirit.” Example 1shows a fairly simple approach, from their version of Tears for

Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” The see-saw four-note motive with

which the verse begins continues into the chorus of the Tears for Fears original;

The Bad Plus’s version, taking that motive and applying a descending sequence

to it until the line ends on a “wrong” note, has the effect of highlighting the song’s

economy of material.

Example 1. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”

Their version of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” seems to focus on two sonic

details of the original: the motivic chorus (with its unusual 7/8 break) and the

cheesy “samba” beat-box pattern at the very beginning of the song.

The Bad Plus’s contention that their versions of these songs are not

intended as parodies is perhaps most strongly bolstered by their striking version

of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It is difficult to hear that anthem of 1990s

angst without linking it to Kurt Cobain’s suicide and the realization that “Smells

Like Teen Spirit” opened the floodgates of commercial success that Cobain was

ill prepared to handle. If Cobain’s post-“Smells Like Teen Spirit” material can be

read postmortem as one long suicide note, The Bad Plus’s version of “Smells

Like Teen Spirit” (Example 2), even as its voicings evoke McCoy Tyner’s work

with Coltrane, proceeds almost like a psychiatric evaluation, its relentless bass

and drum turbulence and strategically placed “wrong notes” indicators that

psychically all is not well.

Example 2. “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” 1:47-2:50.

Another way in which The Bad Plus has shifted the genre borders of jazz is its

use of materials drawn from twentieth-century contemporary and experimental

music. Of course there are precedents here as well along jazz’s fringes, from the

music of Sun Ra and Anthony Braxton to the “third stream” movement that

resulted in, among other things, twelve-tone composer Milton Babbitt composing

a piece for jazz ensemble called “All Set.” Iverson notes that the weakness of

Third Stream was its “politeness,” especially in the area of drumming: “none of

the late 50’s/early 60’s Third Stream music interfaces with drummers on any level

but that of a cool handshake.” The difference here is that The Bad Plus

sometimes filters its rock standards through this aggressively modernist filter; in

this way their approach is perhaps closer to a rock band playing jazz rather than

a jazz band playing rock.

The group’s version of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” is also telling. Rush’s song

depicts Tom Sawyer as a “modern-day warrior” of self-reliance, at the cusp of

freedom on the borders of society: “What you say about his company is what you

say about society.” The synth break and guitar solo in the middle of the song

depict Sawyer’s stance on the edge of freedom, as Peart’s drumming continually

threatens to undermine the 7/8 groove.

The Bad Plus’s version expands on this idea of “the cusp of freedom” by

presenting a number of musical dialectics, shown in Example 3: unordered

chromaticism versus ordered ascending pentatonic scales; metered time versus

free unmetered time, white keys versus black keys, all punctuated with the three-

note tutti cadence that brings things back under control.

Example 3. “Tom Sawyer,” 1:59-2:26.

For The Bad Plus’s latest release, For All I Care, the group made two

striking departures: recording with a singer for the first time (modeling this

decision on John Coltrane’s sole album with vocalist Johnny Hartman in 1960)

and abandoning the inclusion of original material. Instead, nestled amidst

deconstructed rock chestnuts like “Barracuda” and “Comfortably Numb” are

versions of aggressively modernist classical pieces by Milton Babbitt, Igor

Stravinsky, and György Ligeti.

The Babbitt inclusion, “Semi-Simple Variations,” has an interesting history

in the band. Iverson performed this in 2007 in “an evening of spooky modern

music” hosted by New Yorker critic Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise, at the

Paris Bar at the National Arts Club in New York. In adapting Babbitt’s “Semi-

Simple Variations” to a jazz trio format, Iverson writes, they needed to address

two problems: First, “how do you fit real, grooving drumming into the context of

harmonically advanced and rhythmically disjunct modern classical music?”, and

second, “how do you bridge the gulf harmonically between really modernist

classical music and what a normal jazz musician can improvise?” The first

question was neatly answered by Babbitt’s fitting all musical events onto a steady

sixteenth-note grid; these events are, incidentally, rhythmically serialized

according to the 16 different ways of parsing four sixteenth notes into patterns of

sound or silence, like binary code. The second question is more difficult; Iverson

admits that the “improvisation” here is not strictly twelve-tone, and in fact it comes

across as rather rudimentary. What is interesting is that the group recognizes that

Babbitt used his twelve-tone row across the so-called “theme” and first

variation—this segment of the composition comes back at the end as a “head,”

turning Babbitt’s miniature of abstract serialism into a true swingin’ jazz chart.

They even filmed a video for the song, available on YouTube, with dancing

women in flapper dresses.

The Bad Plus’s border crossings seem to be popular. At a performance I

witnessed in Houston in February, it was refreshing to see young jazz and rock

fans headbanging to Babbitt. The band’s success is arguably part of a bigger

picture in which jazz is becoming revitalized from the margins. Consider the

similar piano trio work of Brad Mehldau, whose repertoire extends beyond jazz to

Radiohead and Nick Drake; or the Chicago-based chanteuse Patricia Barber,

who gives Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” and Tom Jones’ “She’s A Lady” the

torch-jazz treatment. Like The Bad Plus, Barber’s work is informed by

developments in twentieth-century music; her “Postmodern Blues” name-drops

Boulez as her piano solo in that piece evokes the sound-mass pointillism of

Ligeti. Marsalis and his acolytes continue to promote the historical center of jazz

tradition, but on the margins it seems that the borders are ever porous. Perhaps

this is one instance of a condition permeating all of popular music. Where

classical pianist Christopher O’Reilly covers Radiohead, a musically incongruous

but eminently marketable Jay-Z cameo is permissible on a Coldplay song, and

Willie Nelson will seemingly sing a duet with anyone—to say nothing of the

ubiquitous mashups and remixes all over the Internet—all of the most interesting

musical activity seems to be dancing on the borders of tradition.

REFERENCES

Bailey, Derek. 1992. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. New York:

Da Capo Press.

Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.

Iverson, Ethan. 2009. “TBP Video: “Semi-Simple Variations” by Milton Babbitt +

TBP Explains Its Modernist Covers.” INTERNET:

http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2009/03/tbp-video-semisimple-

variations-by-milton-babbitt.html, accessed 4 April 2009.

----------. 2007. “The Story of Prog.” Keyboard vol. 33 no. 9 (September): 42-44.

----------. 2007. “Working with the Composer.” INTERNET:

http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2007/10/working-with-th.html,

accessed 4 April 2009.

Mitchell, Rick. “The Bad Plus Makes the Grade.” Da Camera of Houston 2008-

2009 Season Program Notes. Pp. 29-31.