Bad Plus Adds Diverse Musical Elements to Jazz

“I think the easiest description—or category to put us in—would be a jazz group,” says The Bad Plus drummer, David King. “But a more accurate description, if you really wanted to get pompous, is that we do music of novelty.” The band, which incorporates various techniques and multiple genres into its musical selection, transcends the classification of being simply a jazz group. Comprised of King, bassist Reid Anderson, and pianist Ethan Iverson, The Bad Plus will be performing at the Berklee Performance Center this evening as a part of a national tour promoting their most recent album, “For All I Care.”

The group exudes an energy that truly attests to the trio’s jazz roots. “Jazz has spread in so many different ways over the course of its existence,” King says. “I feel like we’re part of the jazz canon, because we are improvisers first and foremost.”

But jazz isn’t the defining element of The Bad Plus, whose latest album features both original tracks and a number of covers, including renditions of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” and Igor Stravinsky’s “Variations d’Apollon,” a 20th century classical piano piece. “We rework rock music, we play original music, we play classical music, we score for dance, we’ve got music for fashion,” King says. “We’re interested in boundary-less influence. And we try to take it and filter it through this sound of The Bad Plus. So I think our story’s a little more complex than a jazz trio.”

The history of the band’s sound is as layered as their influences. King and Anderson, who have known each other for over 25 years, first bonded over the song “Rock & Roll Band” by the rock band Boston. They played together with Iverson for the first time in 1990, and though the trio went their separate ways throughout the 90s, they kept in touch. “We needed the 90s to gestate, develop our own personalities as musicians and improvisers,” King says. “It was interesting, because we were in our own bands, we were putting out our own records and getting things here and there, but it was only when we came together that it really popped for us. We realized there was something special between the three of us.” By the start of this century, the three members had fully committed to The Bad Plus.

In the past, the band has interpreted songs by Nirvana, the Pixies, Neil Young, and Interpol, among other rock groups. In “For All I Care,” released in February of this year, The Bad Plus incorporates classical music into their repertoire for the first time.

“We wanted to approach [classical music] differently and have it be the sound of The Bad Plus—kind of cerebral, intense, contemporary classical music. It was a new challenge, a new tool. We wanted to see what would happen, and it started to really work,” King says. “We’ve been playing it live every night, and it’s really fun to add that into our original music and some of the rock pieces.”

The Bad Plus also experimented with a vocalist, Wendy Lewis, in their most recent album. “It’s part of the jazz tradition to mess with instrumentation,” King says. “So we thought, why don’t we go all the way and get a vocalist?”

The trio knew from the first, however, that they needed a very specific kind of vocalist—someone who would accommodate the existing sound of The Bad Plus while bringing another element to the music. “There’s a record by John Coltrane called ‘John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman’ where the Coltrane Quartet brings in a singer,” says King. “It’s one of our favorite records….Their sound was still intact—it just had vocals. We wanted to bring in a singer that was more of an ensemble member and not a big jazz diva.”

King hopes that the concert at the Berklee Performance Center will be a testament to their versatility, diversity, and ability to incorporate the sound of The Bad Plus across many genres. “We open the show with the trio, we do some original music, we do some contemporary classical music from the new record,” says King. “And we bring out Wendy and [continue to] tear it apart. We try to do everything with the same energy. It’s very cool.”