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A New, Plus-Sized Bad Plus Lineup Makes Its Cleveland Debut

The Bad Plus
The Bad Plus (from left): Chris Speed, Reid Anderson, Dave King, Ben Monder. photocredit: Evelyn Freja

The Bad Plus,” Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times, “could be the group you use to turn your 17-year-old cousin on to jazz.” Twenty-two years and two lineup changes later, Ratliff’s observation might be more salient than ever.

The band’s two sets Friday at BOP STOP will mark the first Cleveland appearance for the third incarnation of The Bad Plus. For nearly two decades, the group was a piano trio with first Ethan Iverson then Orrin Evans in the piano chair. When both left to pursue their own projects, bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King changed course brought on guitarist Ben Monder and saxophonist Chris Speed. Incredibly, while the sound of the band has changed, its character has not. Paradoxically, the current quartet might be the Bad Plussiest version of the band yet.

Credit Anderson and King who have been playing together since they were teenagers in Golden Valley, Minnesota, 40 years and counting. And though pianists often get outsized attention in a trio setting, this lineup of The Bad Plus reveals anew what has been there all along: it’s the rhythm section that gives the band it’s unique sound.

photocredit: Evelyn Freja

Give Minnesota a little credit too. “As Midwesterners, we always had a view that all of the truly interesting, innovative stuff was happening elsewhere, that we had to go to New York,” Anderson said in a video call last week. “We had to leave.”

Anderson did that, moving to Philadelphia to attend the fabled Curtis Institute. It’s not hard to hear the bassist’s conservatory training in his strong, clear sound and pinpoint intonation. King, who still lives in Minnesota, played in rock band at home and still does. His thrashing, whomping drum attack gave the original trio version of The Bad Plus an extroverted, nearly anarchic foil to Iverson’s deadpan pianism and Anderson’s dead-on bass.

This scandalized the jazz police who viewed the band’s cover version of songs by ABBA, Aphex Twin and, most notably, Nirvana, as cynical sell outs, not recognizing that for much of jazz’s history, its practitioners have played the popular songs of their day.

The Bad Plus takes this a step further, writing originals that sound like pop songs. Listening to the melody of Speed’s “Cupcakes One,” you can almost hear a lyric in your head.

“Melody is certainly a key factor,” Anderson said. “We’ve been saying all along, we’re very focused on the song–capital “S.” We’re trying to write songs. And to us, that’s the most important thing.”

The Bad Plus - Complex Emotions cover

Complex Emotions (Mack Avenue Records, 2024), the most recent of the band’s19 releases, is full of them. All four members contribute, with Anderson grabbing half of the eight composer credits, King with two and newcomers Speed and Monder with one apiece.

The stylistic range is wide, from the shimmery, summer-afternoon lyricism of King’s “Casa Ben” with its echoes of Keith Jarrett’s American Quartet to Anderson’s jittery, drum and bass-influenced “Tyrone’s Flamingo.” Ironically, Monder’s dark, menacing “Li Po” used the poet’s “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain, “when he recorded it on his Planetarium (independent, 2024) album.

That’s a lot of range, but after a quarter century, the singular approach of The Bad Plus informs every bar of the music. When he’s asked—as he often is—how to categorize the band’s music, Anderson said, “I personally always end up responding something along the lines of, well, we’re improvising, and our improvisation comes out of the Western jazz tradition. Our harmony is kind of all over the place and we draw liberally from all of our influences.

“So I guess you could say jazz, but it’s our version of it, which is not as pithy as saying, we play this genre of music, but I think it kind of sums it up.”

Anyone that’s ever been in a band—or loved one—knows how hard it is to keep one together. At 25 years, The Bad Plus is an outlier when it comes to staying power, though all the band’s members have their own projects and are notable leaders in their own right. Yet longevity is not the point, not for Anderson anyway.

“We’ve definitely made our statement and the number of years that we stay together isn’t really a part of that as far as I’m concerned,” Anderson said. “We keep it going because it still feels like we have something to say and, you know, it’s still enjoyable. We still find inspiration from each other and the music itself and as long as that’s there, we’ll keep it going or it’ll just end, it’s fine.”


The Bad Plus Friday., Feb. 7, 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Rd. Cleveland, Tickets $40 available here.

NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.

Red beans and ricely yours,

jc