Record Exchange Boise

Reviews:

Fifty years ago, jazz performers covered pop songs routinely. The most treacle-dipped Tin Pan Alley fare was considered the raw material for improvisational transmutation. When the Bad Plus cover pop songs today, though, the jazz trio has to duck charges of gimmickry. They first grabbed rockers' ears with a downright ingenious take on "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on 2004's These Are the Vistas, produced by Tchad Blake to create a full in-studio sound more akin to rock than jazz.

It'd be too facile to say that bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer Dave King sound like a rock band but play like a jazz band. Still, Prog is as rocky as its name suggests, a vision of fusion without electric guitars. They even worked with Tony Platt, who recorded and mixed a little record you may have heard of called' Back in Black. What are the covers this time, you ask? Well, Prog opens with Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World": First Iverson flattens the notes of the melody, then, as the piano drifts away in quasi-classical sheets, his Stravinsky influence shows. They take on Bacharach, Bowie, and, with a real flourish, Rush's "Tom Sawyer."

The danger, of course, is that the covers have the potential to overshadow the originals. Until you listen to the originals, that is. The intro to Anderson's own "Physical Cities," which begins with a duel between intricate runs and King's intricate rolls, before it breaks down into a rock backbeat, is the most thrilling moment here. And the spazzy closer "1980 World Champion" is so joyous and jittery that only a real stick-in-da-mud would accuse these guys of gimmickry.