The Bad Plus were excellent. A whole new way of using the piano-bass-drums jazz trio format (in this sense, not unlike The Necks, with their very different sensibilities): the music is carefully composed, complex, but with the energies of jazz, combined with a little punk and quite a lot of ‘prog rock’. Friends since school, they have a proprioceptive sense of one another in performance. The expanses of the music may owe to the expanses of the mid-West, as the bass player Reid Anderson attempted to explain, I think, in one of his gnomic announcements. (He said something similar in The Wire.)
Patricia and I were in the front row at Manchester’s Northern College of Music last
night; I’d bought the tickets Googling the band and must have hit
pre-advertising for the Manchester Jazz Festival. That probably explains why I
didn’t know Alexander Hawkins was playing (free) earlier in the day, which was
galling.
See here for my earlier general thoughts on poetry and jazz.
See here for my earlier general thoughts on poetry and jazz.
