The Bad Plus These Are the Vistas (Columbia)
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None of the recent half-assed, self-conscious simulations of jazz–from Hancock’s flaccid covers of familiar R & B and rock songs to the marriage of jazz elements and club beats brokered by European acts such as St. Germain and Bugge Wesseltoft–has managed to increase the music’s paltry slice of the marketplace, and with good reason. From beboppers incorporating Afro-Caribbean rhythms to Miles Davis borrowing from psychedelic rock, jazz has absorbed new influences most successfully when it sets out to create something new and distinctive. Cassandra Wilson brought a sensual air of anticipation to the Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville,” but Ella Fitzgerald just sounded ridiculous stumbling through “Savoy Truffle” in an attempt to win over the kids.
For Hancock “All Apologies” was just a pretty set of chords to tinkle over, but the Bad Plus approaches “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with a conscious awareness of the energy and spirit of the original recording. The musicians aren’t just responding to the melody, they’re making sense of rock dynamics–you can hear it in their recreation of the soft-to-loud leaps of Nirvana’s version, and in the violent glissandos Iverson repeats in the chorus. Although the music on These Are the Vistas is wholly instrumental, the trio provides oblique little narratives for each tune in the album’s liner notes: the original composition “1972 Bronze Medallist,” for instance, is about a fellow named Jacque, who won a weightlifting medal and is now retired in a small seaside town in France, where “every day he walks bare-chested to the beach, medal swinging in time to his proud gait.” Such vignettes help give the rock-trained audience its bearings–these aren’t simply chord patterns to be improvised over, but songs that give voice to a story or a sentiment.
The Bad Plus makes its Chicago debut with a free concert at the Chicago Cultural Center on Thursday, April 3, at 7 PM. See Section 3 listings for details.
