Last night I went to see the Bad Plus, my favorite jazz group, perform their reinterpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 Rite of Spring, a touchstone of modern classical music that is about as interesting and challenging as classical music gets. (The Rite is famous – or infamous – for supposedly precipitating a riot by the unreceptive audience at its premiere in Paris.)
TBP is well known for their reinterpretations of everything from jazz standards to pop and rock music by the Pixies, Nirvana, Blondie, David Bowie, and many others. Though their “covers” are almost always compelling, I’ve become increasingly impressed by their original compositions, so much so that I’d rank Never Stop, the last album and their first to be entirely originals, as their best album yet.
Given the increasing quality of their own material (which was pretty good even on their first major album), I was a surprised to learn that they were going back to 1913 to redo the Rite. My surprise faded when I read loads of positive reactions to the premiere earlier this year, and completely disappeared yesterday night when they crushed the piece – making it their own while also paying homage to Stravinsky’s original (full disclosure: I know very little about classical music, but I’ve listened to the Rite quite a few times as homework for this concert).
I was particularly impressed by TBP’s ability to capitalize on Stravinsky’s wild dynamics (his use of crashing timpani is staggeringly dramatic and loud) while putting those dynamics into a TBP frame. Having long ago mastered the use of rock-like dynamics and rhythms to fuel their music, the trio has only in the last five years started making their music more lyrical – and done well at this, too. In playing the Rite, they did an excellent job using rapid, jazz-like changes in tempo and dynamics to heighten the drama that Stravinsky wrote into the piece – but without losing hold of the quieter, more lyrical passages in the original: the softly gathering introduction to the first part, for instance, which gradually shifts to a more threatening, cacophonic sound that’s exactly right coming from the Bad Plus.
After that point, the music was a tide of sound: gorgeous and lush at some points, stripped down and aggressive at others, and concluding with a powerful rendition of the last two scenes, “Ritual of the Ancients” and “Sacrificial Dance,” which the trio called the hardest in the entire piece. Stravinsky achieved the pounding buildup in the original with horns, but TBP did it all with Ethan Iverson’s piano, Reid Anderson’s bass, and especially Dave King’s drums. That last scene was stunning.
All in all, the Bad Plus did a fantastic job with the Rite of Spring. If the concert had ended there, after about forty-five minutes of classical post-punk jazz (or something), I’d have headed back home happy, half-deaf, and vibrating with excitement. But it didn’t: the boys came back out to play a really nice encore of six songs – “Anthem for the Earnest,” “Cheney Pinata,” “Giant,” “The Empire Strikes Backward,” an unnamed new Anderson tune, and finally a quick sprint through “Never Stop.” All but the last were pretty markedly different from the album versions, but all rocked pretty hard. Leaving the theater (the really nice Loring) I could look forward to maybe an recording – live, even? – of the Rite and a new album of straight jazz. Knowing TBP, both might come out this year, which would rock about as hard as they did Saturday night.