A Jazz Experiment Ends Like It Began: ‘Throwing Down’ Every Night
For more than two decades, the Bad Plus has explored how a jazz group with no leader could sound and what rooms it could play.
“Thank you for caring about our music,” Reid Anderson, the bassist of the Bad Plus, told the crowd near the end of a show at Sony Hall in Midtown Manhattan in June. A minutes-long standing ovation followed, acknowledging the performance and the group’s 26 years as one of the defining ensembles in 21st-century jazz. Its members announced in January that they would disband at the end of 2026.
“Never stop!” one fan yelled toward the stage, riffing on the title of the band’s 2010 album, or possibly requesting its upbeat title track. “Until you stop,” Anderson deadpanned back, referencing the group’s farewell world tour, which will return for a final New York show at Le Poisson Rouge on Thursday.
The set-closer that followed felt quintessentially Bad Plus. A version of the slow-burning “You Won’t See Me Before I Come Back,” it featured impassioned improv from the band’s saxophonist, Chris Speed, and a shuddering climax spearheaded by its drummer, Dave King. But what lingered in the mind was the piece’s pensive, spectral melody. As with the entire set, and the band’s career as a whole, the song itself was paramount.
Over dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant before the show, Anderson and King, both 56, confirmed that this notion had been central to the band since they co-founded it with the pianist Ethan Iverson in 2000 as the rare jazz group without a leader.
“That’s the whole point of the Bad Plus,” Anderson said. “It’s the writing. It’s the concept. It’s our voices and the way we bring them together.”
His reserved demeanor contrasted with the emphatic conversational style of the tattooed, flannel-clad King, whom he first met in junior high school in Minneapolis. The drummer offered that it had always been a priority for the Bad Plus to move beyond “obvious conclusions.”
“‘Oh, you just put some people that can play really well together and then they’re all amazing and they’re all shredding and it’s amazing and you’re so great and you’re so great,’” he said, caricaturing a glibness that can prevail in some jazz circles. “We always looked at it like, ‘What else you got?’”
The group’s subtler strengths were sometimes obscured during its initial early 2000s breakout, when the oddly named outfit (King came up with the moniker while brainstorming “a Pop Art use of words”) was best known as a jazz piano trio playing covers of rock and pop tunes, such as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”
“We’re not a piano trio just kind of like playing some goofy homage to Black Sabbath,” King said, looking back on that era. “What we’re trying to do is get inside that energy and use that for a springboard for how we play together.”
Gregg Belisle-Chi, a guitarist 20 years Anderson and King’s junior who subbed in with them on tour this summer, first heard the band at a formative time. “I feel like I was their prime audience because I was probably a teenager listening to Nirvana and Sabbath and rock music, but also had an interest in jazz,” he said in a phone interview. “They’re creating a space for you to just enjoy what you enjoy and not have to hide anything,” he added.
In a genre that tends to lionize individual soloists and bandleaders, the group’s commitment to a collective ethos also made a strong statement. Joshua Redman, who toured and recorded with the Bad Plus in the 2010s, said in a phone interview, “I think the fact that they really were a group meant that each one of them was giving a hundred-plus percent at every moment in the music, from beat one until the curtain fell.”
“It was that kind of dedication and focus,” he continued. “‘This is our music; this is a band; we’re here to deliver our message.’”
That idea of delivery was key to the band’s success. For its entire life span, the Bad Plus has toured hard and often, building an audience night by night, the way a rock group would. (At Sony Hall, the merch table bustled with fans lining up to browse the band’s wares, including shirts commemorating the so-called Stop Tour, featuring the droid graphic from the cover of its 2003 major-label debut, “These Are the Vistas.”)
“Every night we’re throwing down whatever we got,” King said, “and then we’re going to the next town.”
That spirit has taken them far beyond the well-worn 21st-century jazz circuit. In a phone interview, Speed, who joined the band in 2021 along with the guitarist Ben Monder, noted the range of venues that they’ve played just this year, including jazz clubs, recital halls and a rock-friendly diner in Dallas, where they played a “loud and aggressive and fun” standing-room gig. “We can play the grungy clubs and we can play the theaters,” he said. “We can do any venue and we make it work.”
From the start, in line with their communal spirit, all of the members of the group composed, tapping into an aesthetic of unabashed lyricism with an undercurrent of droll humor. But particularly in Anderson’s prolific pen, they had, as King put it, “that weapon of somebody that could write something that was somehow familiar yet totally unique and original.”
The band’s signature style has endured through two major lineup changes. First, Iverson departed in 2017, replaced by the pianist Orrin Evans. “He played the way he plays with us and the Bad Plus appeared,” King said of Evans’s onboarding. “That felt great that we were able to kind of live the message, like, ‘The Bad Plus is this thing: It’s not led by anyone.’”
Further evidence of this idea: The band’s self-titled 2022 album, which debuted the Bad Plus’s current lineup, felt as definitive as “These Are the Vistas.” Exclusively featuring pieces composed by Anderson and King, “The Bad Plus” showed off the band’s full range of strengths, including expressionistic avant-jazz tangles, hauntingly evocative ballads and driving anthems underpinned by big rock beats.
Speed said that coming into the group he immediately understood the fundamental question in any Bad Plus performance: “How’s the best way we can make these songs speak?”
“The band has such a wide range of where we go, but everywhere we go, we try to make it very clear and very poignant and just make it hit,” he added.
Given all the work Anderson, King and their various collaborators have put in to hone their signature approach — King estimates they’ve played around 170 shows per year since their early days — why are they putting the Bad Plus to rest?
To hear them tell it, it was simply time. Last year, after a lengthy European tour — where, King said, “the expenses were really outweighing the amount of work we were doing” — he called Anderson and suggested that it might be the right moment to wind down. The bassist quickly agreed.
“I brought it up to him almost like giving each other permission to admit that maybe it had reached a certain point where we felt like maybe this is the time to be able to say goodbye to audiences,” King said.
“There is something to picking your moment when you leave on your own terms,” Anderson added.
Anderson also noted an increasing desire for novelty among promoters and programmers that works against the band’s core philosophy. “You don’t get to be a band that’s been together for 27 years and has a sound and has a legacy, has a body of work; that’s not enough,” he said of the current touring climate. “There has to be like, ‘Oh, what’s the next shiny object? What’s the next project that you’re doing?’”
Post-Bad Plus, Anderson says he plans to compose more and explore electronic music. (“I don’t really see myself playing bass much in the future, if at all,” he said.) King still works with Happy Apple, the offbeat jazz trio that he co-founded in the mid-90s, and plays sporadically with artists such as the guitarist Julian Lage and the trumpeter Marquis Hill. He said he wouldn’t mind freelancing with fewer time constraints.
As the band heads into its homestretch — the tour will conclude with a final edition of its annual late-December residency at the Dakota in Minneapolis — the Bad Plus imperative is the same as it’s always been.
“I have no doubt, humbly, we’re going to do what we do,” King said, looking ahead to that night’s gig. “We’re going to throw down.”