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The new CD from the 21st-century-defining trio The Bad Plus was released in the US yesterday (for some reason it was available in Europe for a few months now.)  The big news is that they have added a vocalist, Wendy Lewis, and the album is exclusively covers (rumor is that their next album will be all originals, presumably back to the trio.)  The covers are mostly rock-pop tunes in a spirit similar to the covers they have been doing since the beginning, but they have added classical music to the mix, like a Stravinsky that they re-work to sound like very conventional jazz-pop, and something called semi-simple variations.  Partly because these tunes shed the vocals from the other tracks they come closer to the style of music the Bad Plus has been doing succesfully in their previous records.

The recording is not ideal.  To make room for the vocals, the other instruments are mushed into the background.  The drums seem sometimes badly miked and even the piano loses definition at moments where you really want to hear it, especially on the last tune “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate.” On the other hand, the bass stands out beautifully and really sits right in the middle of the music.  In some of its best moments the CD feels like a duet between the bass and the vocals.

Wendy Lewis has a good voice which is ideally suited for many of these tunes, but not all.  The ballads are the weakest because her voice is not always “pretty.”  I am not knocking her here, she is truly a “vocalist” in the sense that she uses her voice as an instrument and she is doing surprisingly well at integrating her instrument into this already dense music.  But in ballads like “Lock Stock and Teardrops” and “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” nothing complicated is going on and it comes across more like a coffee-house poetry reading than singing.  By contrast and proof that she really has command of different vocal styles, in “How Deep is Your Love” she takes on a sultry, breathy voice which adds a dimension to the music which is missing elsewhere on the album.  Her voice soars over Iverson’s arpeggios in “Comfortably Numb” and she flat out rocks on “Barracuda.”

What is the verdict on this work?  For sure there are many reasons to applaud the Bad Plus for experimenting with vocals and these covers.    In some ways they are being brilliantly opportunistic because pop musicians inexplicably refuse to try and build a canonical repetoire and these great tunes are therefore just sitting there waititng to be reinterpreted for the first time.  If “Long Distance Runaround” was “jazz”, it would be a standard.  Still, I come away disappointed with the CD.  Largely this is because of the recording, but also because with just a few exceptions this doesn’t advance what the Bad Plus is doing, instead it feels more like a side project.

But what’s really important to me is what this CD suggests the live performance is going to be like.  I can imagine that on stage the trio will open up more behind and in between the vocal passages and this could make the whole thing pay off.  We’ll see.