The Wake

In the world of jazz, The Bad Plus are like an airborne C-130 Gunship. Circling over their weak and unsuspecting prey - those cheap, doctor-jazz producing pukesmiths (see Kenny G. and Michael Bolton) - they unleash an ivory-strewn arsenal, obliterating all traces of their too-smooth targets. The band is a virtual shitty-music-killing-machine. Their latest, Give, swings this musical-mediocrity massacre into ravenous, army-of-the-dead mode, with zombie-like proficiency, The Bad Plus stop at nothing until every ear-ache-inducing, imitation jazz artist is d-e-s-t-r-o-y-e-d, pul-ver-ized, terminated, musically disemboweled in their wake. Whether in the Españacana-rumba-rythym of “Cheney Piñata” or the techno-bowlified, futura space-jazz of “Neptune (The Planet),” the guys in The Bad Plus – all Midwesterners, two of whom are from Minnesota – provide the vital life-elixir (that poisonous lite-jazz thinning agent) that has eluded jazz for much of the past decade. And clawing through cover-versions of “Veloria,” and “Iron Man,” on Give, the trio incites a new American jazz-canon in which alternarena-rock gets tripped-out on Coltrane and Mingus. And this is what makes The Bad Plus so psyche-blowing: there is no retrofication in their songs, no mere re-hashing of stand-bys and techniques. Instead, the band seems to thrive on vaporizing entire conceptions about what jazz is and exhaling them as what it can strive to be.