dave king: serious musician
The Bad Plus drummer's lessons on artistic vision, jazz, creativity, and more.
When I was a teenager, I played drums in a jazz group with some friends. We played the usual standards, tried to improvise and get some gigs. One of the guys in the band suggested we cover Aphex Twin’s Flim. Jazz piano trio The Bad Plus had recently covered it. I wasn’t familiar with either group and just winged it. When I finally listened to the original tune and then The Bad Plus’s cover, I couldn’t even make sense of it. It wasn’t until years later that I started listening to The Bad Plus and finally ‘got it’. Since then, the band’s originality, ferocious dynamics and creativity, with powerhouse Dave King on the drums, have been a big influence on me both as a musician and as a creative person.
The Bad Plus started making waves with their 2003 release These Are The Vistas. Pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer Dave King brought an avant-garde background with a rock-band ethos to the piano trio, crafting a sound of their own. The band gained mainstream success with their out-of-left-field takes on rock and pop classics like Smells Like Teen Spirit and Heart of Glass. It’s common now for jazz groups to cover music from other genres, but The Bad Plus were among the first. The band played stages from The Village Vanguard to Bonnaroo while staying true to their roots. The current lineup features band co-founders Anderson and King joined by guitarist Ben Monder on guitar and saxophonist Chris Speed.
Dave King sat down with Elmo Lovano (drummer and Jammcard CEO) to talk shop. King and Lovano go deep on the band’s history, sticking to your artistic vision, fun stories about opening for the Pixies and receiving kudos from Geezer Butler, and using ‘source material’ as a ‘launchpad for the avant-garde’. King is notorious among drummers for his creative drumming, employing gizmos and gadgets as percussion as well as his satirical, deadpan humor in the faux-instructional series Rational Funk. King continues to be a creative force in drumming as The Bad Plus support the release of their new album Complex Emotions.
Below are a few lessons on artistic vision, jazz and creativity from drummer Dave King.
Dave King’s lessons on art, music and creativity:
Follow your vision. Anderson, Iverson, and King wanted to be a ‘band’, not just another piano trio. King points out that there haven’t been many “band identities” in jazz and most piano trios are leader-centric. Each member of the original lineup composed music, so they each have an artistic voice in the band’s direction. While recording their first album, the group worked with mix and recording engineer Tchad Blake which gave their records a different sound than people were used to hearing from a jazz group. From the jump the band had a vision: reframing what people thought a piano trio could be, with the “dynamic range of sonic youth plus the learned nature of jazz” while creating their own unique sound.
Use your influences. Back in the early 2000s, The Bad Plus were among the first jazz groups to figure out that any genre of music - rock, pop, electronic, classical - could be the ‘source material’ for improvisation, a ‘launchpad for the avant-garde.’ How? King explains that he and Anderson were big rock and electronic fans but that Iverson hadn’t listened to any rock music and genuinely never heard of Nirvana. So the band was able to approach a song like Smells Like Teen Spirit in a fresh and exciting way. The band ‘hijacked’ songs they liked and played them as if they wrote it, honoring the song instead of playing something obvious.
Try things even if they don’t work. King looks sort of like a hip octopus when he plays drums, arms flailing about, sticks moving in weird directions. He’s going for a certain sound and pulling an incredible amount of sonics out of his small four-piece kit. Some uncommon percussion items King has used: walkie-talkies, kid’s toys, and a cooking pot. The odd distorted snare drum sound on Flim is created from King hitting the snare with an actual robot-voice-changer gizmo. King says every night when he’s performing he’s trying to make something happen whether it’s an epiphany or a failure. He doesn’t know for sure if he’s going to be able to play it but he’s going to try anyway.
Remember to have fun. King’s Rational Funk youtube series earned a cult following among drummers and music school cats in which King riffs on topics such as memorization, playing with brushes, and ‘how to get the gig’ while satirizing drum instructional videos. King incessantly curses, inflates his own ego, and spouts all sorts of nonsense. But the actual drumming is great.
Do your homework. King wonders about the impact of the “sugar splash of a clip on instagram of somebody macking post-Dennis Chambers over an ostinato”. Allow me to put that in English for all the non-drummers out there: how does an age of endless content of drummers shredding for views and likes rather than supporting actual music affect up-and-comers? As a Gen-Xer, King is part of the last generation of kids who grew up without the internet, instead listening to records and watched the masters perform live. Is the internet and social media watering-down jazz? Musicians have to do a lot of homework if they want to really learn the music.
The Bad Plus played the music they love and formed their own unique sound and identity. It’s easy to look back now and see how their style and sound influenced today’s music. King says he’s most happy when he plays the music that reached him and can continue to make a living by reaching more people through jazz.
“Sometimes you get to be lucky enough to be a refreshing moment, if you can enter that lexicon of the mainstream for a minute and you don't dumb it down… you amp it up.”
Until next time,
Keith.