The Bad Plus at Bop Stop

The Bad Plus
BOP STOP at the Music Settlement
Cleveland, OH
February 7, 2025

Teachers of jazz—the good ones, at least—emphasize the importance of finding an individual sound. That goes for ensembles, too, and at their Friday appearance at Cleveland's Bop Stop, The Bad Plus demonstrated how, even with a radical overhauling of personnel and instrumentation, it can be done.

For two decades, The Bad Plus brandished what might have been the most distinctive piano trio sound in jazz. It was big and weighty, at least on record, whether Ethan Iverson or Orrin Evans was in the piano chair. Still, the locus of that sound has always come from bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King.

Though the two have played together since their middle school days in Golden Valley, Minnesota, they make an odd pair. Anderson is tall, lanky and in his stage remarks, droll in a classic Midwestern way. His bass sound, always accurate (he is conservatory trained) has grown more quietly authoritative and sturdier with time, emerging now like a great tree. King is smaller and looked almost elfin hunched behind the house kit in his peaky beany, but he bursts with antic, at times gleeful energy.

Among the newcomers, guitarist Ben Monder is known for soaring, exploratory solos, but those were in short supply at Bop Stop. Instead, he mostly supplied color to the band's sound, painting spacious canvasses in Old Master umbers and glowing ambers. This gave the ballads a ghostly, Great-Plains-at-night quality that was enhanced by the hypnotic nature of compositions such as the through-composed "Grid/Ocean," a slow processional with a unison head over funereal toms and the measured tread of Anderson's massive (and well-miked) bass.

The other half of that unison was Chris Speed whose snaky clarinet on the opening "Casa Ben" established one of the evening's many melodic earworms (melody is The Bad Plus's secret weapon). On tenor, Speed's sound can be melancholic and his manner discursive, but in a searching, serious way. That was true even on "Sick Fire," a drum concerto for and by King that quickly exploded into near-free territory, with the composer spraying sharp volleys at high speed as though his drums were an AR-15.

The 80-minute set (there were two shows), concluded with Anderson's "You Won't See Me Before I Come Back," a moody song (a real song; one could almost hear an emo lyric) with a minor melody that briefly rises to a hopeful bridge before falling back. Here, what had been subtly evident all evening became manifest: Anderson's grandfatherly, oracular bass is the band's center of gravity, the starting place for The Bad Plus's sound world.

It takes guts to end with a ballad, a reassertion, perhaps, of the stubbornly independent—even contrarian—streak that has characterized The Bad Plus from the beginning. "You Won't See Me" wasn't an especially uplifting musical benediction to send a Sunday evening audience back out into the cold of a Great Lakes winter in the chaotic and menacing February of 2025. Yet it seemed apt, a way to say, these are the vistas and we want them darker.