The Bad Plus: Give : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

By jazz-purist standards, the Bad Plus are piano-trio gangstas, playing heretical covers of Abba, Blondie and Nirvana with titanic perversity. But pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King are quite serious about their sedition. They never merely jam on those songs; they build new, tightly scripted rapture from pieces of the original tunes and rhythms. On Give, their third album, the Bad Plus triumphantly bag truly extreme game: the roiling guitar noir of the Pixies' "Velouria" and Black Sabbath's death-fuzz march "Iron Man." In the former, Iverson's piano tiptoes into earshot as cymbals and bells rise up around him like steam. Then, as he hits a peak of rolling-note grandeur in the chorus, the trio kicks into hard-stepping funk that is more like 1969 Sly Stone than like the Pixies or Bill Evans. "Iron Man" is slow and heavy, of course. But King rolls across his kit with volcanic ecstasy, and at the end, the Bad Plus veer from minor-key holocaust to major-key sunshine: Ozzy as the Prince of Light. Iverson, King and Anderson are also outstanding composers, and they connect inside these originals with the same aggressive joy and melodic verve. Anderson's "Dirty Blonde" is a particularly enchanting example of their symphonic pow and empathic tension: the sweeping melancholy of the piano; the nimble rubbery jump of the bass; King's fierce, sobbing swing. By any standard, jazz or otherwise, it is moving, mighty music - bad in all the right ways.

DAVID FRICKE
(RS 944, March 18, 2004)