The Bad Plus

A jazz performance by The Bad Plus

written by a member of the University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee

Before attending the actual concert this past Friday, I went to the UMS educational event, "Music of The Bad Plus", which was held on Tuesday, February 2 at the UMMA Commons. In this educational event, UM jazz professor Andrew Bishop gave a presentation on The Bad Plus' music. He explained that what the group performs is an interesting synthesis of three distinct genres, whose distinctions they like to blur: jazz (of course), and popular music, and (more unexpectedly) European art music. Several UM Music School students were on hand to punctuate Prof. Bishop and his collaborators' talk with live musical demonstrations.

The Bad Plus actually presented two separate concerts on Friday February 5, both at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater in the Michigan League. I attended the second of the two concerts. From friends who had attended the first concert, I heard that they had played arrangements of pop songs (something which they are famous for) in that concert, while in the later (9:30 pm) concert, which I attended, they played mostly their own compositions.

In his book The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond, the critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt writes that piano trios tend to come in two different flavors. Some piano trios are what Berendt calls "conversational" trios: the musical model in such a piano trio is that of a musical dialogue between the pianist, percussionist and bass player, with each taking turns to solo and respond to the other two. The other model of the piano trio is what Berendt calls the "power" trio, in which the three musicians are more invested in playing music simultaneously, creating a convergence of sound, rather than in taking turns solo-ing. The Bad Plus proved to be solidly in the "power trio" tradition, with its three musicians -- Ethan Iverson on piano, Reid Anderson on bass and Dave King on drums -- playing mostly together and feeding off each other's musical energy. It was a measure of how enthused the audience was by the musical fireworks, that it stood on its feet applauding rapturously with such intensity that The Bad Plus returned on stage to give not just one but multiple encores.

Finally, I have a suggestion for UMS. I think that the decision to have this performance at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater was an excellent one. The Mendelssohn Theater is ideally suited for intimate and edgy performances of this nature -- just as it was for the UMS performance by another edgy, avant-garde band, eighth blackbird, a couple of years ago. (I had written about that performance, too.) However, I think that the location of the University Museum of Art Commons for the educational events associated with the performance is not a good choice. This is the second UMS educational event at the UMMA Commons that I went to -- the other one was in connection with the Bill T. Jones performance -- and I had the same thoughts on both occasions. Firstly, the UMMA Commons space is too small. On both the two UMS educational/pre-performance events that I attended there, there were more people than the space could accommodate. If you must have the educational events there, perhaps you could at least get rid of the tables among the audience in the room, which just take up space and perform no useful function during the pre-performance event. Without the tables, you could accommodate more people in the room. Also, the chairs in the UMMA Commons make too much noise every time someone drags them -- it is very distracting. It would be nice to have the educational/pre-performance events at a less noisy space.