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For All I Care

• The Bad Plus
• Heads Up International
• 

The Bad Plus is the most controversial group in jazz today, a distinction that becomes far less impressive once you realize just how tiny a teacup such tempests fill. For starters, the Bad Plus doesn't take the traditional, swing-based approach of most piano trios, opting instead for a rhythmic base that draws from rock, contemporary classical and hip-hop styles.

Worse, the group likes to cover tunes by such contemporary pop acts as Blondie, Nirvana and Rush, a choice the group's detractors see as pandering at best and anti-jazz at worst. Lord knows what those folks will make of For All I Care, which devotes eight of its 12 tracks to versions of tunes originally recorded by Yes, Heart, Pink Floyd and the Flaming Lips, but the odds are they won't take the inclusion of a vocalist as a step in the right direction.

A pity, because what the vocal tracks on For All I Care show most clearly is just how far from the pop aesthetic the Bad Plus lives. Yes, singer Wendy Lewis tends to avoid the stretched notes and melodic filigrees traditionally associated with jazz singing; her performance hews close to the melody, and at times echoes the timbre of the originals (Heart's Barracuda offers a particularly vivid impression of Ann Wilson).

But that's hardly the same thing as sounding like a pop singer. If anything, Lewis's melodic accuracy and deadpan intensity has more in common with art song, think of lighter Poulenc chanson, than rock 'n' roll, something that both rolls back the bombast on tunes, such as Comfortably Numb (from Pink Floyd's The Wall), and neatly distills the romantic desolation of Lock, Stock and Teardrops (a 1963 hit for Roger Miller).

The larger connection to classical music here isn't accidental. The four non-pop selections on For All I Care are drawn from works by Igor Stravinsky, Gyorgy Ligeti and Milton Babbitt — the latter two derived from impossibly virtuosic piano pieces. But rather than reduce the pieces to "jazz tunes" by way of swing phrasing, the trio condenses each into a string of essential themes that are reharmonized and improvised, creating something new while retaining the overall thrust and structure of the original.

That's also how they treat the pop material. Because the three are such artful arrangers, the amount of material edited out or reconfigured isn't always immediately apparent (although A-B comparisons between their versions of Lithium and Barracuda are eye-opening), but there are a couple tunes that are masterpieces of reinvention.

Long Distance Runaround, a Yes tune that seems both windy and rambling in the original, comes across here as a deftly modulated meditation on love and trust, while the Bee Gees' How Deep Is Your Love is a minor masterpiece, transforming the breezy romance of the original into heartbreaking melancholy, until the chorus hook takes on the emotional weight of a Mahler adagio.

In short, what the Bad Plus do with these songs is what jazz musicians have done with standards for ages: given us a new way of hearing them. Isn't that tradition enough?

The Bad Plus performs March 10 in Victoria and March 11 in West Vancouver.