San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Music
Bad Plus is part of the lineup at the 2019 San Jose Winter Jazz Fest.
Back in the day when jazz was America’s popular music, a player jumping ship from one band to another could be big news. The decision by trumpeter Cootie Williams to swap a spot with Duke Ellington for Benny Goodman’s orchestra in 1940, for instance, caused such a stir that Raymond Scott promptly wrote and recorded “When Cootie Left the Duke.”
No one’s composed any songs yet about Orrin Evans taking over the Bad Plus piano chair from Ethan Iverson last year, but on a scene where band drama stays undercover as a rule — because, well, jazz mostly flies far under the pop culture radar — the personnel change did earn widespread notice. For Bad Plus bassist-composer Reid Anderson, the buzz about that news is a tribute to the trio’s status as “one of the few actual bands in the music. Period.”
"We were with Ethan for 18 years, and we wore our group identity as a badge of honor,” Anderson says. “It’s a testament to the power of committing to a
group sound.”
Evans makes his first Bay Area appearances as a member of the Bad Plus with a series of gigs around the region, playing Yoshi’s in Oakland on Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 16-17, Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center on Feb. 18, and Café Stritch on Feb. 21 as part of the San Jose Jazz Winter Fest.
Part of the coverage’s barely concealed subtext stems from the contrast between the pianists. Evans is a standardbearer for Philadelphia’s exuberantly creative black music scene, while the original Bad Plus consisted of three Midwestern white guys. Anderson and Bad Plus drummer-composer Dave King both came out of the Minneapolis indie rock scene, and they shared with the Wisconsin-raised Iverson a regionally inflected poker-face sense of irony that the pianist once described as “a Coen Brothers-like outlook on life.” Applied to slow-burning versions of rock tunes like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” it was an attitude that earned the trio an avid following and a major-label contract at the turn of the century.
Evans, a highly respected bandleader with some 20 albums under his own name, might not have seemed like an obvious choice for the Bad Plus, but he had close ties with the band. He first met Anderson in the early 1990s when the bassist was studying classical music at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, “and starting to play some jazz,” Anderson recalls. “Orrin got my number from someone when he needed a bassist to play his sister’s graduation party. We played quite a bit through the ’90s.”
After studying with National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Kenny Barron at Rutgers, Evans started releasing a series of acclaimed albums for the indie labels Criss Cross, Posi-Tone and Palmetto. He’s worked with illustrious jazz and hip-hop artists, including tenor sax titan Pharoah Sanders and powerhouse trumpeter Sean Jones, and rappers Common and Mos Def.
Part of the rambunctious cooperative combo Tarbaby with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Eric Revis, Evans is up for a Grammy Award for “Presence,” the third release by his Captain Black Big Band. He contributed a couple of tunes to 2018’s “Never Stop II,” his first album with the Bad Plus, but he’s still figuring out how to write for the trio, a finely honed organism that’s evolving with every performance.
“They started when everyone was in their 20s,” Evans says. “I joined the band at 42 and already had a career as a leader — a big difference. The older you get, you pick and choose your battles more carefully, something I say with the utmost love.
"What’s incredibly exciting is to see how Reid and Dave will interpret the new music I’m writing.”