Our good friend Neddy likes good music, and he wants you good folks to like good music as well. So listen to him when he preachifies about The Bad Plus.

I’ve run out of fingers counting the number of times I’ve seen The Bad Plus in the last few years, and I don’t have enough toes to count the ways in which they continue to diverge from the prototypical jazz trio. What’s left to say? And yet, each viewing brings new wrinkles and reaffirmations: They’re just really, really good.

This time around, the first twist was that they’d left the Village Vanguard and the other jazz clubs of Manhattan behind and took their act to a rock club, the Highline Ballroom, which got all dressed up like a big ol’ jazz hall. I’ve never been to the room before Saturday night and was impressed with the combination of coziness and comfort, the sight-lines and just about everything else besides the drink prices. Even though they had tables set up from front to back and forced a drink minimum on everyone, it still felt more like a rock club and one to which I’m looking forward to returning.

The Bad Plus came out nearly right on the dot of the scheduled start time of 8 pm and wasted no time getting their Bad-Plussiness on. The first tune, later identified as the new Blue Candy, felt almost like a warm-up than a typical TBP composition. It started out mercilessly slow and languid, without too much melodic form or anything else to grab onto; it almost felt like pure improv, actually.

A minute later, it zigged then zagged and all of the sudden it was too fast, like a roller coaster cresting over the initial ascent. I should have known it was a Dave King tune, the drummer whose compositions increasingly experiment with rhythmic structure — experiments whose goal seems to be the experimentation itself, like a warped kid discovering how many different ways they can kill bugs.

Read on for more of Neddy’s fanboy review of the Bad Plus at Highline…

Next up was Ethan Iverson’s newest, Who Is He?, which I couldn’t get a good bearing on on first listen but am looking forward to getting acquainted with. You do have to hand it to a band that should be pimping their new album, out barely a month, and decided to open with two songs that barely a soul in the audience has heard yet.

The Bad Plus is constantly moving forward, sometimes to a fault — wonderful songs that are barely a year or two old somehow get dragged-and-dropped to the recycle bin on the TBP desktop, never to be restored to future setlists. So, it was with some relief when they busted into Reid Anderson’s And Here We Test the Powers of Observation, which seemed destined for such a trash heap. Why a relief? Because “Powers” is a really fucking good song, maybe as good as these guys have got. It’s brilliance lies in the perfect balance of songwriting and execution. A pop masterpiece in the guise of a workout for three jazzed up maestros. While not as sharp as when they were playing it every night, the evening loosened up for the better midway through this one, and the crowd just about did the same. The high ceiling and assumed-curfew flexibility seemed to give the band a little more breathing room than I’m used to seeing them operating with. Or maybe that was just the perception from where I was sitting.

Smells Like Teen Spirit from October 2006

It wasn’t until four songs in that they finally got around to selling the album, Prog, (stop reading and go buy it now if you don’t have it!). With just another step in the long journey, the Bad Plus is taking toward the perfect cover song. There would be three covers during the early set on Saturday, each engrossing and bewitching in their own way. The early offering was Tears For Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World.

There are many angles a band, especially a jazz band, can take on a cover song, and the Bad Plus seems to be conversant in all of them. For this take on MTV-era pop, they work on an art appreciation level. Almost like they are taking a black and white photograph of the original, and through lighting and shadows, are able to cull tremendous beauty where there once was just a song. Slow, deliberate and gorgeous, it’s not clear that Tears For Fears deserves this kind of treatment, but those of us in the audience certainly would take it. I’m not sure I’ve heard a cover of anything this deeply penetrating — the version on the album, wonderful in its own right, does no justice to Iverson’s melodic interpretation.

Without continuing on song-by-song…they had a couple more non-Prog hits with another newish tune, Old Money, that featured a neat drums-and-bass section in its middle and another old-but-good Anderson tune, Rhinoceros Is My Profession, and then closed the show with the buy-our-CD push of four straight tunes off the album.

Reid Anderson played a melt-in-your-mouth bass solo that dripped right into the opening notes of Giant, which may be my favorite of the new batch. This is all Anderson, as he turns a too-simple couple of notes into an hypnotic inner-journey — the bass playing goes no where and yet takes you everywhere: quiet intensity at its best. The second cover was David Bowie’s Life On Mars, which seemed to take an impossibly and almost irritatingly long time to get going. Just incredibly slow but it paid off when all that tension was released in an ecstatic, drum-bass-piano crash — it felt like three explosive climaxes in a row, guitar shredding on the black-and-whites, total rock and roll.

A clip of Physical Cities from last year

The set closed with Physical Cities, which is the rockingest of all jazz tunes…maybe ever. The whole band gets to flex their muscles with a slinky bass line, quick spiraling piano and impossible rhythms underneath it all. As the purple, green and orange arena lights swirled around King, Iverson and Anderson, all three pounding away more for a crowd pumping their fists high in the air than sitting respectfully at their seats, actual puffs of stage smoke hazing the view, I had a thought of the Bad Plus slogan — The Bad Plus: a jazz band with rock and roll lighting.

Full-on standing O for the gentlemen as they left the stage after a powerful 70 minutes of playing. I would have been willing to bet that they would have followed that up with their version of Rush’s Tom Sawyer, but I would have lost — guess you had to stick around for the late set for that one. Instead, they went older once again, dusting off a highlight cover from their These are the Vistas album, Flim from Aphex Twin.

Aphex Twin’s Flim from 5.25.07 in Boulder

No prog rock from Prog but a nifty bit of electropop, this time covered without too much reinterpretation from the original. No matter, when you’ve got Dave King playing drum machine — his playing during the encore tied double knots in my synapses, just an impossible hyper-rhythmic drumming from beginning to end, totally kick ass — a great way to lead us out into the summer night. Would have been nice to double dip for the late set, but they’ll be back soon enough, I’m sure. Wonder what twists they’ll bring for us then.

The setlist:
Blue Candy (King)
Who Is He? (Iverson)
And Here We Test the Powers of Observation (Anderson)
Everybody Wants To Rule the World (Tears for Fears)
Old Money (Iverson)
Rhinoceros Is My Profession (Anderson)
Anderson solo > Giant (Anderson)
1980 World Champion (King)
Life On Mars (Bowie)
Physical Cities (Anderson)
E: Flim (Aphex Twin)

• Previously on Hidden Track: Good Goes The Bad Plus