Two jazz gigs worth hearing:
The Bad Plus is appearing Tuesday through Sunday at the Village Vanguard. Here’s what I wrote in the Washington Post earlier this year about their debut CD, These Are the Vistas:
The Bad Plus is a piano trio, one of jazz’s most familiar lineups–only Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson and David King don’t sound anything like Ahmad Jamal or Oscar Peterson. Instead of the usual show tunes and jazz standards, they play “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Heart of Glass,” and weirdly tilted original compositions with titles like “Silence Is the Question” and “Keep the Bugs Off Your Glass and the Bears Off Your Ass.” Their producer is Tchad Blake, whose credits include albums by Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega and Pearl Jam. And “These Are the Vistas” (Columbia), their major-label debut, isn’t just a breath of fresh air–it’s a tornado….
The Bad Plus doesn’t do cutesy watered-down covers of hit singles. Instead, they deconstruct the songs of Blondie, Nirvana and Aphex Twin with the same rigorous conceptual clarity that goes into their own originals, and their group sound–blunt, clear-cut, full of splintery dissonances and jolting musical jokes–blends jazz, rock and classical music so indissolubly as to make the differences between the three musics seem trivial.
Alto saxophonist Bud Shank is appearing on Wednesday and Thursday at the Jazz Standard. If you don’t recognize the name, Shank is one of the indisputable giants of West Coast jazz. Prominently featured on dozens of classic Contemporary and Pacific Jazz albums of the Fifties, he’s still alive, well, and by all accounts playing his ass off. As if that alone weren’t recommendation enough, he’ll be backed by a world-class rhythm section anchored by pianist Bill Mays, who was staggeringly adventurous last week at Marvin Stamm’s Birdland gig.
I can’t remember the last time Shank played a New York nightclub gig–in fact, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never heard him live–and I don’t plan to pass up this rare opportunity to find out what he’s sounding like these days. You come, too.