They Bad

The Bad Plus are standing at the intersection of rapidly-converging trends in jazz, alt-rock and experimental music, and with only three big label albums to their credit are already sounding like an important chapter in the ongoing jam-fusion adventure that outside-the-box artists like Frank Zappa and Ornette Coleman started a quarter of a century ago.

What may be the loudest acoustic trio in history has two nights at the Iridium this week to bend your ear and feed your head, and the chances are good that you'll emerge from their raucous laboratory with your senses heightened, or at least altered. Just try not to grin with adolescent pleasure as Ethan Iverson's joyously melodramatic piano slams headfirst into David King's drumrolls and cymbal crashes, with Reid Anderson's pulsing base lines raining down another stratum of sonic debris; at their most energized, you realize they're not just fusing styles or genres-they're fusing sound itself. It's an anarchic, "everyone-solos-at-once" approach to ensemble playing that builds one of the most imposing walls of sounds you're likely to encounter.

The BP's hard jamming sensibilities can get the trio in trouble-at their most pounding and frenetic they sound dangerously like a noise band. If there's a fine line between exuberence and vulgarity, they haven't learned how to draw it. And because their signature sound is so much their own, it's no surprise that their self-penned numbers are generally stronger than their meditations on campy pop anthems (when they had a go at Queen's "We Are the Champions" on a recent EP, they were beating a dead warhorse). Be that as it may, at a time when suit-wearing neo-traditionalists have occasionally turned the contemporary jazz scene into new evidence of Global Cooling, you really ought to be present when The Bad Plus tries for a meltdown this week.