Philadelphia Weekly

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On paper it seems unlikely: An acoustic jazz trio fills New York’s Bowery Ballroom and opens with a lushly melodic movement from Igor Stravinsky’s 1927 ballet Apollon Musagète. But this is exactly how the Bad Plus—pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, drummer David King—have gained an adoring following, and even won over some skeptical critics: by taking original pieces, deconstructed pop and rock numbers, and daunting 20th-century classical works and somehow forging an instantly identifiable band sound.

“There’s a lot of information from a lot of sources,” says Anderson of the trio’s repertoire. “We’re trying to put it in this place where you can enjoy the music without having to have all the information. But if you want to dig deeper, it’s there for you.”

The Bowery show marked the release of the band’s seventh album, For All I Care, which adds yet another twist: vocals. When first approached with the idea, singer Wendy Lewis had her concerns. Would Bad Plus fans see her as a trespasser? “I said to Dave at one point, ‘Oh God, I hope this isn’t going to be like when Dylan picked up the electric guitar.’”

The thing to avoid, all agreed, was the template of a lead singer with a backing band. “I wanted to weave the vocal thing in, like an instrument delivering lyrics,” Lewis explains.

And indeed, that describes her charismatically unadorned delivery on songs like Nirvana’s “Lithium,” Wilco’s “Radio Cure” and Heart’s “Barracuda” (which was chosen many months before Sarah Palin invaded our living rooms).

The Bowery show also included things from the cutting-room floor, including a bent jazz ballad version of “Blue Velvet” and an intense episodic “New Year’s Day” by U2.

“Wendy’s like this progressive music goddess for me,” says King, who’s worked with her on the Minneapolis indie scene. “We needed someone who’d be able to handle the madness that we’re gonna throw.”

It helped that Lewis’ own writing, in Rhea Valentine and other bands, gravitated toward kinks and odd angles.

And behind the Bad Plus’ metric hall-of-mirrors and irrational rhythms is a perceptible logic.

“We’re not just going, ‘Hee hee, how do we make it complex?’” says King. “Each piece is looked at. ‘Wow, this is an interesting figure. What if we just stretch it a beat?’”

The tempo of the Flaming Lips’ “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” is significantly faster for a reason, as Iverson says: “It’s like we’re happy that we’re dying. A very Bad Plus emotion right there.”

“We hear from the original artists that they like it, that it doesn’t sound like tourism,” says King, noting that the Pixies dug a 2004 cover of “Velouria” enough to invite the Bad Plus to open three dates of their big comeback tour. “It’s not ‘ironic,’” King adds. “It’s a real tribute to the music. We’re not buffoons up there macking.”

Yet among jazz insiders, the Bad Plus remain controversial, even if they’re hardly the only young jazz group to be influenced by rock, electronica, modern classical and so forth. Some can’t get past the fact that early in the decade, when the Bad Plus landed a major label deal, magazines like Esquire were proclaiming them “saviors of jazz.”

In retrospect, two things seem clear. Those who hailed them for single-handedly redeeming the music probably weren’t listening to other jazz. But those who took the opposite tack and wrote them off weren’t listening to them.

Soon after tour dates in Poland, Hungary and Turkey, the Bad Plus arrives in Philly, again with Lewis. But a good chunk of the live show with Lewis is instrumental. “We’re very conscious about maintaining our identity,” says Anderson. “What we’re doing with Wendy is a project. The Bad Plus is still the three of us and will continue to be.”

So conditions are ripe for the trio to focus on an ever-expanding book of originals by all three members, not to mention the avant-classical forays, György Ligeti’s Etude No. 8 (“Fém,” or “Metal”) and Milton Babbitt’s “Semi-Simple Variations.”

As Iverson discussed in a recent Jazz Times guest column (titled “Crossing Streams”), jazz-classical fusions can be traced back many decades, yet there’s not much precedent for incorporating drums in a nonsuperficial way.