The Bad Plus

Formed in Minneapolis around the turn of the 2000s, the trio The Bad Plus originally brought together bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer David King around a simple idea: to apply collective composition to a jazz informed by indie rock and popular music. Noticed with a self-titled debut in 2001, The Bad Plus gained wider attention in the early 2000s with These Are the Vistas (2003) and Give (2004), which alternated original compositions with reinterpretations of songs by Nirvana, Aphex Twin and Blondie. The band followed with Suspicious Activity? (2005), Prog (2007) and For All I Care (2008), a covers project with singer Wendy Lewis, establishing themselves on American and European stages. The interplay between precise writing, collective improvisation and rapid dynamic shifts remains central to The Bad Plus’s language, whether as a trio or in occasional collaborations, notably with saxophonist Joshua Redman on The Bad Plus Joshua Redman (2015). After Ethan Iverson’s departure in 2017, pianist Orrin Evans joined for Never Stop II (2018) and Activate Infinity (2019), before The Bad Plus expanded into a quartet in 2021 with the arrival of guitarist Ben Monder and saxophonist Chris Speed, a lineup inaugurated on the album The Bad Plus (2022).