Reviews > Shows

The Trio and The Bad Plus, Merkin Hall, New York, NY, 5/14/09

Marco Benevento took the stage on May 14 (minus his other half in The Duo, Joe Russo) at Merkin Hall and proved himself a ferocious improviser of the acoustic piano. Joining him for the first act of a two-hour concert titled “New Sounds Live: Post-Jazz/Post-Rock,” was The Trio consisting of bassist Reed Mathis of Tea Leaf Green and talented drummer Andrew Barr of The Slip.

WNYC’s John Schaefer hosted the evening with vintage-style interviews between sets as if it were the ‘60s. In his first onstage interview, Benevento told the audience, “It’s the end of the work day. You are here to escape. You want to feel it and release everything. Music, ‘the escape,’ is your drug of choice.” The 31-year-old Brooklyn-based artist, recently released a new album Me Not Me, which includes a mix of new songs and revamped covers.

Off of the new album, The Trio performed My Morning Jacket’s “Golden” and The Knife’s “Heartbeats” as Benevento got the crowd energized when he asked everyone to participate in a foot-stomping, hand-clapping baseline. You could tell it was the finale when Benevento started tearing at his keys the way a starving lion rips apart a fresh zebra.

After the set break, Schaefer introduced The Bad Plus featuring pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson and drummer David King. Iverson explained that the jazz group’s rock energy stems from their younger days listening to rock radio. To King, every nook and cranny of his kit and any child’s toy that made noise was an instrument; he even tried to use his elbow as a drumstick at one point.

The group played “Let Our Garden Grow” and “1972 Bronze Medalist,” a song about Jacque, a weightlifter and local celebrity in the south of France, off their 2003 effort, These Are the Vistas. They covered Stravinsky’s “Apollo” and ended with a romantic, under-the-sea surrealist refurbish of Lou Reed’s “Silence Is The Question.”

As opposed to covering songs, it’s more accurate to say both groups complement original songs. Call it whatever you want, maybe new-post-revamped-refurbished-cover-complement-dynamism, but The Bad Plus and The Trio have carved out their own jazzy niche and successfully transform what might be considered mundane into something all their own.