The Bad Plus
THE BAD PLUS
Suspicious Activity?
Reid Anderson – bass
Ethan Iverson – piano
David King – drums
A billboard outside the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport advises travelers to report “Suspicious Activity,” a phrase which typifies the “paranoid security conscious society in which we’re now living,” says The Bad Plus bassist Reid Anderson. Struck by the advisory, drummer David King found in it the perfect title for the new Bad Plus album and the perfect metaphor for the group’s new music.
“There is a sound in the middle of the three of us that is The Bad Plus,” says David. On Suspicious Activity?, the group’s third album for Columbia Records, that sound moves and grows in fantastic new directions, testing limits of what an acoustic bass-piano-drums trio can accomplish and what genuinely new music can actually sound like.
Pianist Ethan Iverson observes, “Our concept is far removed from the traditional roles of our instrumentation. The idea of ‘piano-in-front-with-two-gentle- accompanists’ is so completely foreign to what we do that it’s simply
