# The Bad Plus: David Fricke says farewell to the original Bad Plus during their final Village Vanguard run: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2018/04/01/the-bad-plus-david-fricke-says-farewell-to-the-original-bad-plus-during-their-final-village-vanguard-run-video-photos/
- Published: 2018-04-01T11:00:12+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**It was a familiar parade. On Dec. 27, the founding members of the Bad Plus – pianist
Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King – walked single file 
along the upper banquette at New York’s Village Vanguard toward the stage for their
first set of the evening. They were dressed much like I first saw them at the club
in February of 2003 – the week Columbia Records released the group’s major-label
debut, _These Are the Vistas – _and many other nights there and around town for 
15 years. Somehow, the Bad Plus – to me the most compelling, reliably challenging
and singularly cohesive trio in 21st-century jazz – always looked like they’d just
arrived from three different bands.**

There was King, the punk-rock laborer in a checked shirt with sleeves rolled to 
the elbows, revealing the tattoos running up each arm; Anderson in more casual attire,
with the professorial beard that looked a little whiter at each gig I took in; and
Iverson in his characteristic dark suit. On this night, Iverson sported an informal
twist under his jacket, a T-shirt with a boxing logo, and appeared to be an extra
step behind the others, as though reluctantly taking his place on the bandstand.

Iverson only had four more nights to go. Last April, the Bad Plus announced that,
at the end of the year, the pianist was leaving the group he established with King
and Anderson in Minneapolis in 2000. By September, King and Anderson were in a Brooklyn
studio recording _Never Stop II_, the first album with their new pianist, the acclaimed
Philadelphian Orrin Evans. Spending the week approaching New Year’s Eve at the Vanguard
had become a tradition for the Bad Plus. This stand was Iverson’s last—a final holiday
round for the New York faithful. It was also an acknowledgement, in its repertoire
and its concentrated reprise of original strengths, that an exceptional adventure
in piano-trio brotherhood had been stuck at a crossroads for some time.

On the 27th, the group played no new material in either set—a first for me at a 
Bad Plus show—and no covers, drawing a red line through the interpretations of Nirvana,
ABBA and Black Sabbath that once drew substantial rock-press attention, including
mine. I wrote the first of several pieces on the Bad Plus for _Rolling Stone_ after
that 2003 engagement, where I saw them detonate Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
as nuclear Monk and find a new bloom, like a Bill Evans ballad, in “Flim” by Aphex
Twin, an English electronica artist.

In retrospect, I can see the holding pattern in Iverson’s last album with the Bad
Plus, 2016’s _It’s Hard_, which was all covers—delightfully eclectic (Kraftwerk,
Johnny Cash, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) yet regressive, a band of determined composers stuck
for a new way forward together. That November, not too long after the record came
out, Iverson told the other two he was ready to leave. That helps explain the set
list at an otherwise dynamite outing that month at Rough Trade NYC, a Brooklyn rock
club with a properly booming PA. The trio played just a handful of nuggets from 
_It’s Hard_, reverting largely to their own vintage hits, so to speak, going back
to _Vistas_.[⌊Iverson, Anderson and King play out their groundbreaking union at the Vanguard in December (photo by Alan Nahigian)⌉](https://i0.wp.com/cdn2.jazztimes.com/2018/03/EthanIversonReidAndersonDavidKing%C2%A9AlanNahigian.jpg?ssl=1)

**Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson and Dave King (from left) play out their groundbreaking
union at the Vanguard in December (photo by Alan Nahigian)**

Likewise, at the Vanguard, King, Anderson and Iverson cycled back through their 
history as a consortium of separate but equal writers, at once serving and propelling
each other in thoroughly bonded performance and surprisingly compact improvisations.
In the first set on the 27th, Anderson’s “You Are,” from 2010’s _Never Stop_, began
as a frenetic hard-bop competition between the bass and drums. Iverson comped sharply
against that interplay, patient and observing, before soloing across the fray with
a precise, stabbing fury, then handing the limelight to King’s eruptive collage 
of accents and rolls.

Iverson also sat by as Anderson opened the pianist’s title song to 2014’s _Inevitable
Western_ with a solo-bass meditation that led, like a walk up a basement staircase,
to Iverson’s intricate, winding keyboard figure. The effect was oblique yet poignant,
like the quietly moving strangeness of the piano in many Randy Newman ballads, until
King abruptly announced his entrance, dropping a cluster of percussion on his floor
tom. King’s “Epistolary Echoes” was an actual groove—the three in clear, funky unity—
while Anderson’s “Prehensile Dream,” a Columbia oldie from 2005’s _Suspicious Activity?_,
was a circular, mounting intensity that always reminded me of both modally spiraling
Coltrane and the angular-riff hypnosis of King Crimson. I’d just seen that progressive-
metal institution in New York a few weeks earlier. At the Vanguard, I wondered again
why, with Rush and Yes in their playbook, the Bad Plus never took a crack at Crimson’s“
Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part Two.”

“We are predominantly an original music band,” King insisted in 2003, when I interviewed
him for _Rolling Stone_. “There’s definitely this cerebral thing happening” in the
group’s writing and covers, the drummer said, but also “this strong, visceral thing
we’re very attached to. I think the most powerful jazz that’s ever been created,
the classic John Coltrane Quartet, had that idea of huge, human involvement in the
music, not just relying on chops or tools—harmonic reinvention, polyrhythm.

“It’s in there if you want that,” King said of the Bad Plus. The band was also “
as simple as people giving their all.”

Fourteen years later, Anderson stopped by my table at the Vanguard before the first
set to say hello. He affirmed what I had seen in some press reports on the split—
that Orrin Evans was his and King’s only choice for the piano seat, adding that 
he had known and recorded with Evans since the ’90s, when Anderson studied at the
Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. The bassist also said this: The Bad Plus
might not have continued if Evans—a longtime bandleader in his own right, in a variety
of settings including the collective trio Tarbaby and his formidable Captain Black
Big Band—declined the offer.

Anderson and I tried to think of analogues to his band’s situation—a profound change
in personnel undertaken while keeping the instrumentation and vision intact. He 
suggested the hard-rock band AC/DC and their fateful change in singers after Bon
Scott’s death in 1980. I countered with Jimi Hendrix’s shift in bassists from Noel
Redding to Billy Cox, but quickly conceded that neither was a composing figure. “
I don’t know,” Anderson said in the soft, even voice with which he played emcee 
that night, introducing his bandmates and the songs with droll asides. “Maybe this
_is_unique.”

The strains leading to Iverson’s departure were not. Last November, while I was 
interviewing Eric Clapton about a new documentary on his life, he recalled a moment
in the film from his psychedelic youth: the guitarist in full improvising flight
with the blues-rock power trio Cream at the Fillmore West, in San Francisco. “It
was so good; we were playing so well together,” he said. “Watching that, I thought,‘
If only they could have found a way to resolve their conflict,’” an allusion to 
the infamous enmity between bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker.

Iverson, at the time of his announcement, addressed the issue of band tensions to
_JazzTimes _vet and WBGO correspondent Nate Chinen with this example from the late
years of the Modern Jazz Quartet: each member of that musically empathic guild sitting
in an opposing corner of a plane’s first-class cabin, jealously guarding his private
space. “Reid and Dave are friends of mine for life,” Iverson went on. But their 
relationships, after 17 years, were not “as fun and as cool as they were at the 
beginning.”

Anderson and King were the initial axis, friends and bandmates starting in junior
high school in Minneapolis. “Reid and I came up to jazz from prog-rock through fusion,”
King told me, then moved “backwards into Coltrane, Ornette and Miles.” Iverson and
Anderson met in Eau Claire, where the pianist was in high school and Anderson was
studying at the University of Wisconsin. They and King first played together in 
1989—“Young and dumb apprentice musicians,” Iverson cracks in his liner notes to
the Bad Plus’ eponymous first album, released in 2001 by Fresh Sound New Talent.“
A tape of that session would be great blackmail material.”

Iverson and Anderson headed East in the ’90s, playing in various groups, often together.(
Iverson also studied privately with pianist Fred Hersch and classical mentor Sophia
Rosoff.) King worked in Los Angeles for a time. Together again in Minneapolis, they
unveiled that reconstruction of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at their live debut there
in May of 2000. Iverson didn’t know the tune or band. He and Anderson had strong
classical backgrounds, King said in 2003, while the rhythm section had that bottom
line in rock: “But we all meet in the jazz center. It’s something we’ve all played
throughout our lives, Ethan being an encyclopedia of it.”

In recent years, as friendships receded and stasis set in, Iverson’s exploration
of jazz history and his energy for musical and cultural analysis spilled outside
the Bad Plus; see his collaborations with such greats as bassist Ron Carter, drummer
Tootie Heath, saxophonist Lee Konitz and especially drummer Billy Hart, and his 
fiercely passionate, at times controversial blog Do the Math. Ironically, on Jan.
2, two days after Iverson’s last set with King and Anderson at the Vanguard, Evans
opened as a headliner at New York’s Jazz Standard, splitting a run between Captain
Black and a sextet. Two weeks later, he was onstage in St. Louis, Mo., with the 
Bad Plus. The band’s first two sets there featured Anderson and King tunes, plus
two Evans pieces from _Never Stop II_. The next day, Anderson confirmed that the
new trio would not play Iverson’s music “moving forward.”[⌊Reid Anderson, Dave King and Orrin Evans of the Bad Plus⌉](https://i0.wp.com/cdn2.jazztimes.com/2018/03/Secondary2.jpg?ssl=1)

**Reid Anderson, Dave King and Orrin Evans of the reborn Bad Plus (photo by Shervin
Lainez)**

In some ways, Evans’ arrival is business uninterrupted. As before, the trio is a
joining of two long-standing associations (Anderson with King and Evans, respectively).
Like the Fresh Sound album, which was recorded after only a few gigs, _Never Stop
II_ was cut as an act of faith in the future, in this case following a handful of
rehearsals.

And like 2010’s _Never Stop_—the first Bad Plus album consisting entirely of original
material—_Never Stop II _features all new compositions, the writing split between
the three members and flaunting a more fluid exchange of leadership. There is a 
shift in character, too, with Evans’ brawny, bop-rooted force and deep-blues vernacular
replacing Iverson’s classical grounding and pointillistic attack. Evans’ rolling
spins through and around the melody are a buoyant counterweight to the dark, dance-
y urgency of Anderson’s “Trace.” King begins soloing less than a minute into Evans’
jubilant, disjointed “Commitment,” and when Evans takes control again in his piano
break, King and Anderson lock into a chase sequence underneath that speaks to their
sturdy, fundamental kinship.

One thing that left with Iverson was his part in the Bad Plus’ deadpan humor, evident
in the song titles (including his “Cheney Piñata” and King’s “Keep the Bugs Off 
Your Glass and the Bears Off Your Ass,” both played on Dec. 27) and super-dry stage
patter, like the jazz version of a Steven Wright routine. In our 2003 conversation,
King told a story about a memorable Vanguard performance of Black Sabbath’s “Iron
Man.” “Ethan read the lyrics first,” the drummer said, “which are just _out._ The
crowd is like, ‘What are they doing?’ Then he starts this piano intro, like Stravinsky.
All of a sudden, we hit it.” King mimicked the song’s stomping riff. The music “
just exploded,” he said, laughing. “The crowd didn’t know what to do.”

We Bad Plus fans may not see the likes of that again. But we have a whole new set
of vistas to look forward to.

![](https://i0.wp.com/cdn2.jazztimes.com/2018/03/Opener-435x290.jpg?resize=435%2C290&
ssl=1)

### _Related_