Farm-to-table jazz 

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The Bad Plus is not simply one of those egghead avant-garde jazz bands. It is a quartet of many contradictions. Free spirits, yet eschewing tedious jazz solos in favor of actual song structure. Blowing off the record label’s design team to create its own album covers.

“I think sometimes people would be shocked how much outside influence occurs, positive or negative, when you’re making records,” said founding member and drummer David King.

The engaging band, which has an 8 p.m. show Wednesday at The Little Theatre, knows exactly what it is and where it is coming from. And that means it is not, King insisted, and as is so often reported, a Minneapolis band. Its four members are spread across the continent, from New York to Los Angeles.

King conceded he is squarely in the middle of that. He is not only from St. Paul, Minn., but still lives there. It’s a good place to bring up the kids, he said, “rather than put them through the raising in New York (or) LA thing.”

But, “If I wasn’t from (St. Paul), I would probably be, like, ‘Oh, that’s an insane place to live.’”

He’s not even picking on one notorious season. To outsiders, Minnesota is known for its glacial moments.

“It’s fun to get the perspective,” said King, “when people come through town and they literally go, ‘oh my god, it's below zero!’” (During an interview by phone last week from his home, King notes that the previous day’s temperature was 97 degrees.)

Change, contradictions … they make life interesting.

The Bad Plus is a band of change, and contradictions. In past incarnations here, it has played the Rochester International Jazz Festival, covering Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit," but only King on drums and bassist Reid Anderson remain. When pianist Orrin Evans left the trio to pursue his own muse, King said he and Anderson mused, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to just take the piano out of the equation completely? And change the entire aspect of the band into a kind of a guitar, saxophone, drum and bass quartet kind of led by (the two of us)?”

Thus, a re-tooled The Bad Plus as a quartet was born, with guitarist Ben Monder and saxophonist Chris Speed.

“Yes, we sound different,” King said. “In a compositional sense, we are very aligned with what it was before.”

Newest members Monder and Speed are of that same avant-garde jazz orbit, anyway. “And they play maybe a little bit more left of center of the normal musician,” King said.

“If you were a fan of the band, you would just feel an evolution, not a deep, huge change," he added. "Simply because Reid and I were always – even though we were the bassist and the drummer – we always fought against those leader-centric prejudices of a piano trio."

By King's definition, The Bad Plus is not comprised of normal musicians. The audience not only hears that, but feels it. “There’s body language and energy that goes along with this idea that you’re a collective,” King said. The idea of a collective is key. Too often, he said, creative types do their own thing. Islands of sound, “virtuosic individuals, and you attach them together, like Legos, and they play.”

The idea is to rise above individuality in what King called “non-leader-centric music.”

King also described The Bad Plus as simply “a modern jazz collective.” A highly curated institution, “a part of the modern jazz family. We meet on that playing field of improvised music. We continue to try and evolve, instead of relying on formulas that worked in the past.”

The Bad Plus may not draw on formulas, but it does have influences. It has tread in classical territory, recording an album composed entirely of Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

“Any time you have music, visual art is a huge component of what can inspire you,” King, who is also an artist and photographer, said. “Our aesthetic has been controlled by us since the get-go.”

The band also draws influence from family; King describes a scene during a rehearsal where Speed was singing through a phone to his daughter. “It’s encouraged to have your life experience brought to the table,” he said.

And if someone’s going through something, some personal travail, the band is there to help, rather than turning to “hired-gun assassins.”

It’s about trust, which lends the band to a certain sound, and the need to take risks.

Improvisation, that’s a risk. It’s a jazz thing. But The Bad Plus shies away from long solos “that sometimes jazz labors through," said King. “The soloing is not the be-all to end-all to what we’re all about. If you listen to a Thelonious Monk record, for instance, we feel like we’re far more a part of that tradition, or early jazz. Duke Ellington or even before, where you don’t have 12-minute songs.”

The audience is spared such often bewildering, long-distance trips. Instead, “The song plays itself out, and is a memorable piece of music,” King said. He dismissed some modern jazz as virtuosic blowing, forgettable compositions and academic puzzles.

“We still keep that tradition of, ‘Hey listen, there’s gotta be a song there.’ And not just a blowing vehicle," he said.

The Bad Plus brings the audience into this collective. There is no energy barrier. The band has memorized its music, it plays with no written charts onstage. They are not musicians peering into a music stand, which King said disconnects people from the experience visually.

“When you see John Coltrane, you don’t see charts onstage," he said. "We want to be a part of the tradition of 'this is music that we know, we’re going to show up and play the music we know' like a group, not individuals. We’re not in our own little world. We’re not self-conscious.”

But here’s what The Bad Plus is conscious of: the fact that it's an art project the band members control.

“It’s unique, in my experience out there in the world,” King said. "From start to finish, farm-to-table, from scratch, the thing we put out has been loved like our little egg in the nest.”

Jeff Spevak is senior arts writer for WXXI/CITY Magazine. He can be reached at (585) 258-0343 or [email protected].