The Bad Plus, Band History, Covers, Jazz Innovation, Drumming Philosophy, and the State of Modern Jazz
Dave King is one of the most distinct voices in American jazz, and as the drummer and co-founder of The Bad Plus, he helped build one of the most unconventional and beloved bands the jazz world has ever produced. Since forming in Minneapolis in 2000, The Bad Plus became known for doing something no one had done quite so fearlessly before: taking the harmonic sophistication and improvisational depth of jazz and applying it to music audiences already knew and loved, from Nirvana and Radiohead to ABBA and Rush. The results were not novelty acts. They were serious, virtuosic, and often revelatory deconstructions that forced listeners to hear familiar songs in entirely new dimensions.
In this nearly two-hour conversation with Elmo, Dave traces the story of The Bad Plus from its formation through its evolution, discusses the philosophy behind their approach to covers, and digs into what makes drumming in a jazz trio setting so different from any other musical context. He speaks candidly about the emotional complexity of sustaining a creative partnership over decades, the state of jazz in a world increasingly defined by streaming metrics, and why he believes great music has always been about the courage to sit with difficult emotions and let them breathe.
This is the kind of conversation that makes you want to go back and listen to The Bad Plus catalog with completely new ears.
"The cover is never about the song. It's about what you bring to the song -- and that's everything."
How Dave, Ethan Iverson, and Reid Anderson formed the group in Minneapolis, what made them different from the start, and the specific artistic vision that drove them to approach jazz from a completely different angle than their contemporaries.
Dave's deep explanation of why The Bad Plus covers work: the theory behind taking rock and pop songs and running them through a jazz lens, what gets preserved, what gets transformed, and why the emotional truth of a great song survives any reinterpretation.
What the trio format demands of a drummer that no other setting does: the responsibility, the freedom, the constant negotiation between holding the time and expanding it, and why Dave views the drum chair in a piano trio as one of the most creative positions in all of music.
Dave on the emotional underpinning of his approach to music: how he thinks about channeling complicated feelings into performance, why he distrusts music that is only comfortable, and the role that vulnerability plays in genuine artistic expression.
An honest, wide-ranging conversation about where jazz stands in 2024: what the genre has gained from its expanding definition, what it risks losing, and how artists like Dave navigate the tension between tradition and innovation without becoming either nostalgic or merely trendy.
The lessons Dave has learned about keeping a long-running musical collaboration alive and meaningful: the discipline it requires, the conflicts that sharpen rather than diminish a band's identity, and what it means to keep choosing the same creative direction over decades.
Dave walks through the origin of The Bad Plus in full: how three musicians with a shared sensibility but different backgrounds found each other in Minneapolis and decided to do something with jazz that none of them could have done alone, and why Minneapolis specifically mattered to what they became.
The definitive breakdown of the cover approach: why Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Rush's "Tom Sawyer," and other rock classics became so powerful in The Bad Plus's hands, and the specific musical decisions behind each arrangement that turned a familiar song into something genuinely surprising.
Dave's candid thoughts on the jazz industry: streaming, venues, audiences, the critic ecosystem, and whether the genre's current moment of creative expansion is sustainable or whether it will eventually demand a reckoning with commercial reality.
On drumming and time: Dave's framework for thinking about rhythm not as a fixed grid but as a living thing, and how he developed his specific approach to maintaining pulse while creating the sense of rhythmic unpredictability that makes The Bad Plus performances feel so alive and immediate.
His honest reflection on the emotional complexity of being a creative person who has built an entire identity around a specific artistic vision, and what happens when the world asks you to keep reinventing yourself without losing the thing that made you worth reinventing.
On the future of The Bad Plus and his own creative projects: where he sees the band going, what his solo work explores that the trio cannot, and why he remains convinced that jazz -- in whatever form it takes -- will always have something essential to say about the human experience.