The Bad Plus News

New jazz bands always seem to be germinating new jazz music in Edmonton thanks to the city's busy student population.

Rather than focus solely on her talents as a singer, today's Lana Del Rey concert aims to offer the full package: sumptuous music, evocative images, queenly deportment.

On May 14, just days after The Bad Plus shook The Shedd, another youngish ensemble that's reinventing jazz for a new era, Refuge Trio , plays the University of Oregon's Beall Concert Hall - where the trio's pianist, former UO piano prof Gary Versace , once dazzled Eugeneans a decade ago.

This meeting of the two greatest piano trios in 21st century jazz made for a blissful night of rhythmically complex yet groove-laden improvisations.

Jazz may be America's greatest gift to music, but since its late '50s heyday, the art form has too often become marginalized by the same process familiar to classical music fans: devolving into either endless recycling of the same old standards or an extreme avant-garde content to play shrieky, "out" sounds for a tiny in-group audience.

Growing up in Golden Valley, the pianist got his inspiration at Walker Art Center.

The Bad Plus has been slow to evolve -- which isn't a bad thing. The jazz trio from New York by way of Minnesota hit on a core sound that didn't need to be messed with.

I'm sorry, I have to start out with a boring statement you've all heard from me before: once again, Cal Performances has a great season coming up, loaded with great performers, premieres, the rarely-seen-or-heard, the new, the old, the in-between. Okay, it doesn't have this past year's lineup of operas , but it does have the return of the Vienna ... (more)

"The theme of the evening is playing tunes at least one of us knows," was Ethan Iverson's straightfaced explanation of this impromptu encounter with two local partners, rather than the American pianist's regular sidekicks in the Bad Plus .