Cal Huss is joined by The Bad Plus for a guest DJ session discussing their impressive 25-year journey from the Midwest to New York. The band highlights their recent performances at Dazzle in Denver. They talk about their two distinct sets while sharing some music that is personal to them. (Interview date: 3/27/2025)
Cal Huss: All right. Cupcakes One from The Bad Plus, and I’m happy to say that I’m joined right now by The Bad Plus. We heard Donald Bird also on that set, Blackbird from his kind of jazz funk era, and then started the set with an unusual cut from Pharoah Sanders. Thought that would get us in the mode to talk to some jazz legends around here. They’ve been going for, what, over 25 years? Have you been around since the nineties?
Dave King: Me and Reid with the original Bad Pluses 2000. But we’ve all been around way through the nineties and everything.
Cal Huss: Midwest roots, and then you became a New York based operation.
Dave King: Reid and I, Yeah.
Cal Huss: Cool. The Bad Plus, got the quartet in the Denver studio right now, and you’re here playing a couple shows at Dazzle just there last night, and then you got two more tonight. What can you tell the listeners about getting out to those?
Reid Anderson: Yeah, we’re at Dazzle. It’s the new Dazzle. We’ve played all the Dazzles. And yeah, we have sets at 7:00 and 9:30. Denver’s always been really supportive of us and if you’ve got a free evening and want to hear some music, come and see us.
Cal Huss: Is there gonna be much of a variance between the seven o’clock and the late night?
Dave King: We’re more tired at 9:30, so we still bring it, but you might notice if you’re at both, that it starts to drop off midway through the second set.
Cal Huss: Oh okay.
Reid Anderson: We’ll play, that tiredness aside, we’ll play two entirely different sets. I think we repeat one song.
Cal Huss: We’ve got a transparent bunch in the mix here and they’re telling it like it is. This is gonna be a little bit of a guest DJ session, so I’ve got some music lined up that you’ve brought in. Let’s talk about this first track from Ornette Coleman. I think this comes from a later album in his career, and it’s a bit unconventional overall. Would you want to tell us why you brought this in, Reid?
Reid Anderson: Yeah. I think one thing is, a lot of people recognize the name Ornette Coleman, but they may not really know his music or the kind of breath of his music. This is from Science Fiction, his record Science Fiction, which was 1973, and a pretty unique record within his uva. I find this to be an incredibly beautiful and mysterious piece of music. Something that really hit me hard when I first heard it as a young person. And I just, yeah, I just saw this as a good opportunity to have some other people hear it.
Cal Huss: Now, when you got introduced to it, were you familiar with Ornette Coleman or did this kind of come in as a first look for you?
Reid Anderson: I was, I must have been around. I guess probably around 18 when I first heard this record. And I knew some of Ornette’s music, The Shape of Jazz to Come is his seminal record and I knew that record quite well. But not a lot of his other stuff. He did have a pretty long and varied career, and he explored a lot of unique territory. Everything that he does, everything that has his fingerprints on it is unique in a very orate Coleman kind of way. But, a lot of people think that’s unapproachable or it’s just free jazz, which is not true. Really it’s very beautiful, very extremely melodic music. There are elements that you can put on some records and it’s very free and very noisy music and that, but that by no means describes his whole output.
Cal Huss: So let’s give this one a listen. What Reason Could I Give here on KGNU’s Morning Sound Alternative. We are being joined by guest DJs and musicians The Bad Plus, keep it locked and we will come back for more.
Cal Huss: Alright, Ron Carter and Jim Hall. What do you wanna tell us about this track?
Ben Monder: Just hearing it again it’s just overwhelmingly beautiful. And Jim Hall is a really important figure for me as a guitar player. The first guitarist that really blew me away. The first one that really emphasized the idea of improvising compositionally leaving lots of space. He had his own personal sense of harmony. He used the guitar like a little orchestra where he would exploit all the possible textures. And this track is, first of all, it’s an unusual approach to playing. I’ll Remember April, which is usually thought of as an uptempo tune. It works really beautifully as a medium ballad like this. And I love the base line that Ron Carter plays, and they’re just synced up. Like the time is on a very rarefied level, and it’s just spell binding.
Cal Huss: Yeah, really nice track. Hope that you’ve enjoyed tuning in with that one. Jim Hall, Ron Carter. I’ll Remember April. We just heard What Reasons Could I Give from Ornette Coleman? And we are being joined right now on the Morning Sound Alternative with The Bad Plus. Who’s playing Dazzle for two different sets this evening. So if you’re in downtown Denver or if you want to come to downtown Denver, Dazzle is just an absolute treasure. And we’re excited to be joined right now with the internationally renowned Bad Plus and bring in some cool tunes to share with us. So up next I’ve queued up My Little Brown Book, and this one comes from that wonderful Duke Ellington, John Coltrane collaboration. I think this was 1963. What do you wanna tell us about that?
Chris Speed: It’s Chris here. I play saxophone with the band, so I picked a saxophone player, a pretty good one.
Dave King: He was finding himself at this point on the record on this Duke record.
Chris Speed: He’s like the inexplicable universe. It’s endless. Any song, any era, anything he was checking out was just always level 10. Everybody knows this record, and they’re probably most familiar with the opening track In A Sentimental Mood, which is also sublime and beautiful. But I just think this track is so simple. And Coltrane, he’s the level of Sinatra as far as interpreting a ballad. It’s just, we mostly know Coltrane for, giant steps or like crazy, modal playing for 30 minutes, whatever. But just the side of him is so sublime and beautiful and nuanced and it’s everything in music for me. So I just thought, why not play it instead of some weird Bulgarian folk music that nobody would like.
Dave King: I want to hear that. It’s true though. This record is, I always cite a few albums. That makes me fall in love with the music and of course, like you mentioned In A Sentimental Mood is that sort of thing, that is, I don’t know a person from any life experience that doesn’t hear that and like it. You can be a hardcore punk musician and you could melt in front of that piece, but the whole album is so magical. It’s so cool you picked this piece, man.
Chris Speed: Also, just the combination of Coltrane, at that point he was well established and knew where music was going. And then you have this iconic figure Duke Ellington and just the two of them meeting you just wanna be a fly on the wall with that session.
Cal Huss: I’m excited to get into this track and I think that it, you use the right word, sublime. This one really is just such a, it’s such a different mode for Coltrane to be in at the time. Like he just put out, I think before this, it was like Olé Coltrane. I mean he was doing these big bands wild.
Chris Speed: He was doing everything simultaneously. Giant Steps was like a month after Blue Train. So it’s just like he was doing everything and could do anything, and it’s always the highest level. So his ballad playing, he’d been doing just as forever as well. And it’s just, this is just a perfect example of it,
Cal Huss: My Little Brown Book here on KGNU’s Morning Sound Alternative. Being joined with The Bad Plus who are doing a little guest DJing right now. Thanks for joining us.
Cal Huss: Alright, having a good time reflecting about the sonic qualities of this track recorded live at Birdland 1963. This is another one from John Coltrane, and this was picked out by a member of The Bad Plus here. If you’re just joining us, we’ve got the dudes in the studio right now picking some of their favorite and influential tracks to talk about. So this one, Your Lady, what do you have to say about it?
Dave King: I picked this one but we’re also, when you’re told to just bring in a couple tunes, you can go into the sort of oh, there’s this obscure thing that I’ve been checking out or whatever. But then anyways, I love that we all just come back to, I think maybe the main reasons why we fell in love with this music. From the Ron Carter, Jim Hall track to Coltrane and Ellington, to Ornette Coleman to this, for me. And I just I guess I was moving into that zone. This record live at Birdland was a super important record for me, just falling in love with the language, especially, some of the best Elvin Jones playing and, the whole band, the group music element of these guys. Like we were just talking about the way that it sounds, it just feels like you’re in the room. It’s not this like perfectly mixed, like it’s not the most reasonable, this is this loud and this is that loud. For me that sort of represents more the real version of where this stuff sits. They’re not making Fleetwood Mac Rumors, this is like live music in a room, and to me it’s blended perfectly. And so I just, yeah I suppose we all go back to these sort of Mount Rushmore figures for us, whether it be John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman, or people like that. And that’s what’s fun about when you have a band. It’s like there’s always some undercurrent of how we all connect. And it turns out it’s like you can have this interest and this personality and everyone is very different to whatever. But then all of a sudden you have these very common influences, even though they’re giants of the music that had maybe a common effect on us. And so it’s like we share that, we get to share that playing field. And that’s always a nice way to think about when you’re on stage with someone and you’re working to try to find something together that we all were raised by these, ultimately these great fathers of the music.
Cal Huss: And I think these are more straightforward references here with the old post bop era jazz guys, but you and your band are known for doing these like really oddball covers at the time where they have nothing to do with jazz, at least in theory, and people might not expect you to bring out Nirvana or TV On The Radio and things like that. I think that there are these Mount Rushmore figures and then clearly you guys have been influenced and you’ve always been doing your jazz in a pretty unusual way, I think. What do you think came into the decision making processes for some of these directions that you’ve gone? ‘Cause you could clearly be a jazz standard group and you have chosen a different path.
Reid Anderson: I think that it’s true that we are known for doing these cover songs as you said. It’s important to mention that it’s not something that has ever been the main thrust of what we do. And in fact, we haven’t done it for maybe eight years or so. We’re very much more attuned to playing our original music, composition and that kind of thing. But the important element for us is just to be very open and honest about the things that are influencing us. Now in the modern world of jazz it’s a little more accepted. But honestly, when we first started off as The Bad Plus back in the early 2000’s, it was still a little bit like, “oh, can you do that? Is that okay to do?” But we felt it was important to have a dialogue with the contemporary popular music that we grew up listening to and that we genuinely like. And that has informed our music going forward. A kind of embrace of pop sensibility as well as the embrace of the avant-garde. And just being open and honest and not feeling like we had to carry the flag for jazz in a traditional sense, but still honoring it because it’s a living art form. It should be a living art form,
Cal Huss: Yeah. And you have to take those strides to make sure that it stays a living art form. I think off mic Ben was mentioning it sometimes feels like everything has already been done, but what you guys were doing that was a new phenomenon. You’re asking yourselves, is this okay? How are people gonna respond to it?
Reid Anderson: Well, we didn’t ask ourselves if it was okay, but other people sometimes ask if it was okay. I think, just on the subject of doing that music and doing contemporary music in this context it was fun for us at the time and it was a great gateway drug and a way for us to actually bring our avant-garde sensibility to the table, but still present it in a package where people were like, “oh yeah, this is a song I know.” But it was really some of our most edgy music a lot of the time. So it served a great purpose. It’s something that people noticed about us, but it’s also, it’s just a small aspect of what we do and have done.
Dave King: Yeah. I wanted to add really quickly is that if you go back and listen to the early records where some of these things appeared, maybe one or two pieces from someone else versus eight originals. But the originals sometimes are, the more inside. A couple of them are like a little more inside. When we did the theme to Chariots of Fire, for instance, on this record, Suspicious Activity. It was our third album on Columbia. It was the only piece that wasn’t original, and it’s the theme for Chariots of Fire. And it’s just a tremendous triumphant melody to hang your hat on almost in an Albert Isler tradition. But we just took it that way to the extreme. It’s this, you can hang your hat on some of these things. And we felt like we were closer to the tradition than was being recognized, maybe in a way by some purist mentality. But we’re speaking of John Coltrane and we’re speaking of My Favorite Things being one of the most important pieces that had an outreach energy without it being something that he was like dumbing down or making accessible. And of course the jazz standard songbook is that. So for us to take it a little further we were looking at things you would never hear as jazz. Maybe there’s a Beatles tune that jazz guys haven’t done. But we went into a realm of we weren’t necessarily thinking about re harmonizing in some sort of Bill Evans tradition, harmonically or whatever. We were like, oh, what does Apex Twin sound or nobody’s taking on Pixies. And so for us, it was a very fertile ground to be able to try and balance some of the original music we had with some stuff that we were all turned onto. But again, we felt like we made that statement very clear in the early years of the band. And then it felt the larger picture of the band has always been more focused on the original music, but we stand by all those things. The clear picture of what we do started to get a little muddy.
Cal Huss: I can see what you’re saying, How some of these recognizable melodies almost give you license to get a little more out when you’re doing it. And then, yeah, that’s the gateway drug for the listener who might not be as into a freer sense of music. We’re gonna close out the morning sound right now and hear this track from the group Women. And one of the band members recently put out this unbelievable record called Cindy Lee.
Dave King: Cindy Lee. The drag personality of the lead singer. Incredible. I saw it live in Los Angeles. But that new album is incredible.
Cal Huss: It’s amazing. And I got plugged into that, and then I was like, wait, this is one of the dudes from that band that I haven’t even thought about in years. So I love that you brought this track Shaking Hand in. And I think that it also exposes some of the diversity and range. We’re not just talking about Coltrane and Miles here
Dave King: Skier rock from Calgary.
Cal Huss: Exactly. So let’s hear this. And I want to thank The Bad Plus for joining us here live on the radio. And if you want to catch their show tonight, it’s at Dazzle, downtown Denver, 7:00 PM and 9:30. You can have two different opportunities to see them play and maybe go in there tell ‘em, KGNU sent you.
Dave King: Thanks for having us, Cal.
Cal Huss: Yeah, you got it. My pleasure.
