Dammit, I love the Bad Plus, and I'll yell it from the barricades. Check out this NYT article with this quote from Ethan Iverson.
''When we all started playing together,'' Mr. King said, ''Ethan had never heard of Nirvana. Reid and I thought this was kind of incredible for a guy his age. This is what inspired us to play covers of rock songs. We'd wonder: 'Wow! What filters this stuff inside Iverson's head? What's he hearing?' We figured he'd give the music a fresh approach.''
So, what did he hear in Kurt Cobain and Nirvana? Mr. Iverson, sitting in his Brooklyn apartment with Mr. Anderson, who lives two blocks away, reflected for a moment.
''With everything I'm playing,'' he replied, ''I take, on some level, a dispassionate look at the raw materials -- the melodies and the harmonies. I basically rip off Stravinsky's way of dealing with harmony as much as I can.''
''Heavily implied in most of Mr. Cobain's music,'' he continued, ''are raw, open fifths. I take these fifths and stack them in every which way. These become the basis of my voicings and the language in my solos. Believe me, Stravinsky would have known how to shape Mr. Cobain's fifths.''
Also from the Times, this article about how a blog post from trumpeter Dave Douglas spurred a blog post by Iverson, which in turn led to "an open-source, alternative canon-building sweep" covering post-'60s jazz. Sometimes I really do forget just how powerful and cool the Internet is.
Posted by nedlog at December 26, 2007 3:23 PM | TrackBack