CMU Reviews @ London Jazz Festival Festival Reviews

Live Review: The Bad Plus at London Jazz Festival on 19 Nov

By CMU Editorial | Published on Saturday 20 November 2010

The residency of The Bad Plus at Kings Place looked on paper to be one of the highlights of this year’s London Jazz Festival and this gig, based on their ‘For All I Care’ covers project started in 2008, lived up to the hype.

The thinking behind the project is to apply The Bad Plus’s ‘style of playing’ to what the band’s members consider to be the finest compositions of the 20th century across a number of genres, including rock, pop, jazz and classical. They played favourites from the 2008 album. including Nirvana’s ‘Lithium’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’, but also some new covers such as ‘Blue Velvet’ and Neil Young’s ‘Heart Of Gold’, which was the encore that came after the first standing ovation.

Special mention should go to drummer Dave King’s solo effort at the start of the U2 ‘New Year’s Day’ cover. Like the rest of the band, King particularly thrives if and when a wave of nervous concern passes through the audience who, for a moment, are led to believe the musician has lost his or her train of thought, and therefore needs extra support. In a way, this kind of method relies on the good nature of the crowd, but once the musician has their support – once he (or she) has convinced the audience they need to hear him succeed – he can play pretty much anything he likes and it will be appreciated.

When Dave King hit his solo, it felt like the drummer had been trying to play rhythmically all his life and just at that moment he’d worked out how to do it. The thrill wasn’t in the sound he made, but in the joyful relief that he was capable of playing the drums. It’s a slightly odd feeling as it might be expected that a professional drummer can play the drums, but to take that attitude is to misunderstand what fans of the Bad Plus want to get from the music.

Being a fan of The Bad Plus is a sweet and magical thing.