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	The Bad Plus Rock on!

Say what you will about the Bad Plus, they’re not boring. In the second of two sold-out sets at the Regattabar a week ago last Tuesday night, the piano-bass-drums trio alternated a four-square uninflected rock beat with free-time spazz-outs and high-speed, stamina-busting tempos. They played Ornette Coleman’s "Street Woman," Abba’s "Knowing Me, Knowing You," and Black Sabbath’s "Iron Man," and about another eight or so quirky originals. And they rode one pile-driving crescendo after another.

The Bad Plus are the latest saviors of jazz, some would say. They now have two albums on Columbia, the brand-new Give and last year’s These Are the Vistas, from which they derived most of their set. At the Regattabar, they drew what looked like an all-white audience of mixed generations and gender — gray-haired jazz fans who showed up a couple of weeks ago for Dave Douglas, twentysomething guys in fleece and pony tails and baseball caps.

With their cross-references to rock and undeniable technical chops, it’s not difficult to see how the Bad Plus grab such a diverse audience. With all those rhythmic changes, there’s plenty to keep a jazz fan’s head busy. On the other hand, there’s not much in the way of jazz harmony. The softer-edged jazz changes of pianist Ethan Iverson’s "Let Our Garden Grow" (based on "I Got Rhythm") really stand out in the din. And Iverson likes to anticipate those crescendos with big, pounding major chords that he indulges fully in a piece like "Iron Man" (or on Give’s version of the Pixies’ "Velouria"). Likewise, drummer David King avoids the dotted rhythms of swing, or even the "pulse" of free-jazz drumming, favoring that Big Rock Four, which he ferociously subdivides into 8ths and 16ths, sometimes whipping up a virtuoso clatter abetted by a comic start-stop choreography of arms and legs. Bassist Reid Anderson’s tone is big and blunt and overamplified, but he’s got lots o’ fingers and played some real jazz in some of his solos, flowing, pulsing phrases detailed with sustains and bends.

The last time I saw the Bad Plus I sat way in back at Ryles, with Iverson’s piano dominating, and the arrangements sounded thin. At the Regattabar, the three-way mesh of interlocking and sprung rhythms at times overwhelmed the piano. But the ensemble was the thing — something that wasn’t apparent back at Ryles and isn’t apparent on disc. The synchronicity was exciting — three-part independence coming together for a cadence in the fraction of a beat. No one sounds like the Bad Plus. Which is a relief.