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ALBUM REVIEWS October 11, 2017

Vector Families: For Those About To Jazz / Rock We Salute You

Read "For Those About To Jazz / Rock We Salute You" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

Drummer Dave King (The Bad Plus, Dave King Trucking Company) has been a significant protagonist within the burgeoning Minneapolis / St. Paul progressive jazz scene amid various ensembles' --including Vector Families --stark experimentalism. Here, the drummer along with esteemed veteran bassist Anthony Cox steer the mutable groove-building episodes on an album that places jazz rock inside an avant-garde dynamic. Hence, these compositions are executed with asymmetrical parts improvisation and structure. With the opener “Free Funk!," King ignites the ...

ALBUM REVIEWS May 29, 2016

Dave King Trucking Company: Surrounded by the Night

By Glenn Astarita

Celebrated drummer Dave King (The Bad Plus, Happy Apple) bonds fellow Minnesota jazz musicians with like-minded New York artists on the Trucking Company's third release. His drums are constructed with bamboo and other woodgrain materials, which is a novel engineering process by the Milwaukee-based outfit Rat Rod drums. King's resonating sound envelops his fluid and punchy timekeeping prowess. And while the album's running time hovers near LP territory at around 36-minutes, the band makes full use of it with a ...

INTERVIEWS December 15, 2014

Dave King: We do music, so we know music

By Ben Scholz

Ever the emphatic artist, drummer Dave King is most famous as a founding member of the contemporary trio The Bad Plus. Rooted in jazz, The Bad Plus has taken creative music to a new abstract height, examining reinterpretations of works by artists as diverse as Stravinsky, Nirvana and Tears for Fears. However, his re-definition of a performing musician's role has not been limited to TB+, his personal side projects, or even the drum set. In this article, we'll explore Dave's ...

ALBUM REVIEWS November 27, 2012

Dave King with Bill Carrothers and Billy Peterson: I've Been Ringing You

By Dan McClenaghan

Drummer Dave King's major fame and fortune--though mostly fame; this is, after all, jazz we're talking about--comes from his work with The Bad Plus. That particular modern piano trio can go loud, combining elements of pop and rock while delving into the avant-garde side of jazz. TBP has been described as bombastic, but King doesn't limit himself to his main gig. He works in several side projects, and for his I've Been Ringing You, he joins up with fellow Minnesotans, ...

ALBUM REVIEWS August 17, 2011

Dave King Trucking Company: Good Old Light

By Troy Collins

Branching out from his duties in The Bad Plus and Happy Apple, drummer Dave King formed the Dave King Trucking Company to explore a highly personalized take on Americana that he describes as “if the great Nashville bands of the '60s and '70s could improvise and were Coltrane fanatics." Building on this idea, King and company bolster tuneful themes with unfettered expressionism, drawing inspiration from the 1970s era work of Gary Burton and Keith Jarrett as well as contemporaneous krautrock ...

ALBUM REVIEWS February 18, 2010

Dave King: Indelicate

By Raul d'Gama Rose

Indelicate has nothing to do with a musician, who plays one instrument, feeling compelled to make an album playing another--alone, or together with his instrument of choice. It is about expanding the sound canvas by using a palette to create a broader range of tonal color and textures. It really ought to have nothing to do with angst either. In the end it can be driven by an emotional belief or socio-political persuasion that becomes a kind of manifesto. Indelicate ...

INTERVIEWS September 17, 2007

The Bad Plus: Drama, Joy, Humor, But Not Irony

By Paul Olson

If you had the remotest interest in contemporary jazz music in 2003, the chances were very, very high that you had heard of The Bad Plus. The odds were just as good that you had an opinion, positive or negative, about the merits of the collective trio of bassist Reid Anderson, drummer David King and pianist Ethan Iverson.The band was everywhere that year. Here was an acoustic instrumental trio with a heavily promoted recording on Columbia Records, no ...