The Bad Plus ended a week-long run at The Village Vanguard last Sunday with a dynamic performance that featured material from both Suspicious Activity and their forthcoming album this spring. Pianist Ethan Iverson sat with his back to the audience and milked the Vanguard’s Steinway for all it was worth. Reid Anderson faced the room with his upright bass, and David King set up shop behind his barebones set, complete with a hodge-podge bag of pots, pans, children’s toys and anything else he felt like pulling out.
The madness began even before the Plus took the stage. At about 8:30, half an hour before the first set was to begin, a strong gaseous odor overwhelmed the basement venue and the Vanguard was quickly evacuated. As we made our way onto 7th Avenue South, fire trucks were already pulling up and hoses being unfurled. Thick smoke was pouring out of a laser hair removal salon above the Vanguard. It was snowing. The Bad Plus themselves stood on the sidewalk with the rest of us, taking in the absurd scene. In twenty minutes we filed back in and the music began.
The Plus opened with the playful “Let Our Garden Grow” off of Suspicious Activity. Anderson and Iverson were in perfect synchrony through the head, and King delighted the crowd with his repeated use of a tingling children’s toy, pressed firmly against his floor tom and rotated about its surface.
Most of the material in the first set seemed to be either part of their next album or otherwise unheard. Between tunes, as Iverson manned the mic to introduce the trio, King and Anderson played over the intermittent applause with delightful mini-grooves that lasted for only a few seconds until the applause ended.
These guys were really working the room. They were relaxed, confident and playful, yet managed to turn the atmosphere upside-down with a special tune entitled “Giant” dedicated to the late great Michael Brecker. It was a quiet, thoughtful piece that received enthusiastic praise from the onlookers.
The Plus concluded their set with a tune called "Physical Cities". Besides the usual tightness and improvisational breaks that make their material so new and amorphous, "Physical Cities" contained a passage, perhaps two minutes in length, where all three, in stop-time, played dramatic hits in unison. I’ve never heard a moment like this in any of their recordings—not even in the Live in Tokyo album. Anderson, Iverson and King seemed cerebrally connected—the length of the section and the complexity both in number and timing of the hits made it seem as if this was going beyond rehearsed material: these are three musicians who are truly fluent in the unspoken language of jazz.
Alex Bodie, a college student sitting next to me at the show, described it this way:
“The combination of Reid Anderson's ‘I Love Tory Spelling’ t-shirt, Ethan Iverson's mellow sense of humor, and David King's random outbursts during songs made The Bad Plus the most personable and intimate band I've seen live."
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