StLJN Saturday at the Movies: They're not just bad, they're The Bad Plus

It's been almost a year to the day since we've featured any video from The Bad Plus in this space, and since they're returning to St. Louis to play Jazz at the Bistro during the first week of January, now seems as good a time as any to serve up some more clips of this much-talked-about band.

Specifically, today's first video is a live version of "Prehensile Dream," and down below you'll find a live performance of "Anthem for the Earnest". Both songs are from The Bad Plus' 2005 release Suspicious Activity.

There doesn't seem to be much quality video online featuring material from the group's 2007 release Prog, but these two tracks should provide the uninitiated with a feel for how these guys operate. And as a little lagniappe, at the very bottom of the post you'll find an interview with band members Reid Anderson, Ethan Iverson and Dave King, in which they discuss the aforementioned Prog and their approach to making music.

Notes from the Net: More reviews of Miles Davis' On The Corner box set, a thankful Clark Terry, and more

Once again, it's been a while since our last compilation of St. Louis jazz-related news and assorted musical items of interest from all over the Internet. So, let's not waste any time...

* First, here's another extended analysis of Miles Davis' Complete On The Corner Sessions box set, plus more reviews here, here and here.

* And via eMusic, here's a review/essay by Kevin Whitehead about Miles' early 1960s quintet and the recently issued recording Live at Monterey Jazz Festival 1963 .

* In other Miles-related news, Toronto trumpeter Nick "Brownman" Ali recently produced a five-week series of Miles Davis tribute concerts exploring music from different periods of Miles' career.

* Another St. Louis trumpet great, the venerable Clark Terry (pictured), recently performed with the Jim Cullum Jazz Band on public radio's "Riverwalk" program as part of a Thanksgiving special.

* Ssxophonist and St. Louis native Greg Osby got some local press in Nashville as a result of his recent residency at Middle Tennessee State University.

* Pianist and composer Linda Presgrave, another St. Louisan turned New Yorker, was back in the Gateway City earlier this month to play at Cookie's Jazz and More, and she's now giving NYC audiences a preview of the same material, which she'll perform on an upcoming tour through Italy.

* Former Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra "creative conductor" Marin Alsop continues to make news as the new musical director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, with a feature in the New York Times and one in Baltimore's City Paper.

* Turning to coming attractions, the Bad Plus, who will be in St. Louis at Jazz at the Bistro during the first week of January2008, are pretty newsworthy themselves, with an interview and performance on NPR affiliate WBGO in Boston; from be.jazz, a review of a gig last month in Belgium; and, from Blogcritics, a review of the latest CD from side project Happy Apple.

* Saxophonist Javon Jackson recently played at NYC's Iridium with a band co-led by pianist Benny Green. Jackson is set to return to the Bistro in January with what's being billed as the "Superband," originally set to feature drummer Jimmy Cobb and pianist George Cables. However, it looks like Jackson, Cobb et al will have to find a replacement for Cables, who's just had double transplant surgery, getting a new liver and kidney. The good news is that the surgery went well and Cables is expected to recover; the bad news is that he'll be laid up for at least six months, whcih means no trip to St. Louis.

* Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, who will be in St. Louis in February to perform at the Sheldon Concert Hall, recently did a "Best of the Big Bands" repertory concert at NYC's Rose Theater, and soon will be performing Duke Ellington's "Nutcracker" at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. They'll offer more Ellingtonia on their Winter 2008 tour, spotlighting some of Duke's love songs.

* Trumpeter Chris Botti is also due in St. Louis early in 2008, with two performances scheduled in January at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. Botti recently did an interview with About.com hyping his new CD Italia, and also was the subject of a recent feature story in the Boston Herald.

* Pianist Michael Wolff, who's playing the Sheldon in February, recently did an interview with AllAboutJazz.com

* Pianist Cyrus Chestnut recently cut a CD of songs associated with Elvis Presley - reveiwed here by Bagatellen - and is doing a show based on the CD at Iridium. Chestnut returns to Jazz at the Bistro on March 7 and 8.

* Catching up with some recent visitors, we find that pianist Mulgrew Miller, who's played the Bistro several times and has recorded for the St. Louis based label MAXJAZZ, recently played Dizzy's Club Coca Cola in NYC and got a very nice review from the New York Sun.

* Bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding, just here last month as an artist-in-residence for Jazz St. Louis, has signed a new record deal with the Heads Up label.

* Saxophonist Josh Redman, who's played St. Louis with his trio and mosre recently with the SF JAZZ Collective, is now working in a trio format and has a new CD, Back East, featuring some of the last recorded performances from his dad, the late tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman.

* Finally, by way of link-dumping a few items of more general interest, my fellow Zappaphiles will be glad be to know that the Frank Zappa family is issuing a DVD of live performances from last year's Zappa Plays Zappa tour as well as a set of live recordings from the Grand Wazoo, Zappa's 1970s big band project.

* Veteran jazz journalist Howard Mandel recently had a nice post on his new blog recently on the influence and enduring importance of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).

* And, in a technological development that could cast many song titles and/or lyrical metaphors in a completely new light, Japanese engineers have come up with a way to build roads that play music as you drive over them. Maybe they can devise one to play Wes Montgomery's "Road Song," or Willie Nelson's "On The Road Again," or (fill in the road-related song title of your choice.)

Notes from the Net: Miles reviewed, Lake reissued, Bad Plus interviewed, and much more

Has it really been nearly two weeks since the last installment of "Notes from the Net"? I guess so, because there are a lot of news items piled up in the ol' inbox:

* Let's start things off with our traditional roundup of Miles Davis-related news, specifically Ben Ratliff's New York Times review of a newly issued Davis CD, Live at the 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival, one of a series of live recordings released by Monterey Jazz Festival Records.

* Next are two more reviews of Miles' Complete On The Corner Sessions box set, one from the New York Sun by Martin Harrison - "It may not have been jazz as we know it, but the Miles Davis band of the early '70s created great music, and the final document of the Davis reissue project presents it with fabulous detail" - and one from the New Yorker by Sasha Frere Jones

* One of Miles' trumpets is being auctioned off as part of an October 14th sale of fine musical instruments that will also include some of George Benson's guitars.

* Oliver Lake has a new CD reissue. Now available on the hatHut label, Zaki is a trio session recorded live in 1979 that features Lake (saxophones), Michael Gregory Jackson (guitar) and Pheeroan akLaff (drums).

* More CD reviews: The blog Free Jazz takes a listen to the new Marty Ehrlich/Myra Melford CD Spark, while eJazzNews had a brief review of guitarist Joe Friedman's Cup O' Joe.

* Trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis, who's coming to St. Louis this week to play at Jazz at the Bistro, just got done performing at the Columbus Jazz and Blues Festival in Columbus, MS. When he's finished in the Gateway City, the third-youngest of the Marsalis clan will be heading to New York to play with his older brother Branford Marsalis in a program for Jazz at Lincoln Center featuring the works of Gil Evans. Trumpeter Terell Stafford, who records for St. Louis based MAXJAZZ label and will play the Bistro in February, also will be part of the group performing the Evans tribute.

* Speaking of acts playing the Bistro later this season, the Heath Brothers are performing this weekend at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, while singer Karrin Allyson has signed with a new management firm.

* Meanwhile, Tony Bennett, who's playing St. Louis' Fox Theatre on October 27, has a new CD, a DVD and a book of his paintings all coming out this fall.

* The Bad Plus, who will return to the Bistro the first weekend of January, are being their usual media friendly selves, with drummer Dave King interviewed by Indianapolis Post before a gig there, and the entire band doing another interview with AllAboutJazz.com. Over on their own blog, the members of the Bad Plus recently discussed their penchant for covering popular songs, while the Secret Society's Darcy James Argue chimed in with some contextually relevant observations about the history of ironic covers in jazz.

* From the "items of general jazz interest" file: After years of effort, John Coltrane's home in New Jersey has been added to both the New York State and the National Register of Historic Places.

* And finally, the New York Times economics blog recently had an entertaining and thought-provoking panel on the future of the music industry that's worth a few minutes of reading time.

Notes from the Net: Reviews of the Bad Plus, Dewey Jackson; funding jazz; and more

Despite the tradional mid-summer lull in breaking news, StLJN's tireless cyborg infotraps nevertheless have scooped up a few items of interest over the past week:

* AllAboutJazz.com ran a review of Live at the Barrel, yesteryear St. Louis trumpeter Dewey Jackson's session from 1954 recently issued for the first time by Delmark Records, the Chicago label owned by former St. Louisan Bob Koester.

* From the "Coming attractions" file, the Journal News, a suburban paper outside NYC, had a feature story on drummer Roy Haynes, who's playing Jazz at the Bistro in September.

* Also, the Bad Plus, who will return to the Bistro the first week of January 2008, recently played London, where one reviewer called them "a subversive US group whose jazz stylings seemed calculated to send up the entire genre...Fragmented, hyperactive and theatrical, The Bad Plus stretch the piano-trio format inside-out".

* An interesting piece in the Chicago Tribune last week examined a collective of businesses and foundations that is helping to fund jazz performances throughout the city:

"Two years ago, several of Chicago's most famous corporations and foundations dared to invent a new model for funding the arts.

In a dramatic move, they joined forces to create an informal philanthropic consortium dedicated to supporting music. This meant, in effect, that each of these big-league organizations risked losing some of the high visibility -- or the "branding" power, in marketers' terms -- that accrues with being the sole or lead underwriter of an arts event.

More radical still, they decided to pour their resources not into safe and conventional musical outfits, such as symphony orchestras and opera companies, but into a less formally organized music that long has been an orphan when it comes to funding: jazz.

Since then, the aptly named Chicago Jazz Partnership has funneled approximately $1.5 million in cash (and nearly as much in in-kind contributions, such as production costs and musician airfares) into a music that's internationally identified with this city.

Granted, that may not seem like a lot of money when compared with the funding of institutions such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which has an operating budget of $57.6 million and an endowment of $202 million. But it's huge in jazz, a music that somehow has flourished for most of a century on nightclub cover charges and bar tabs, but with scant institutional support (multimillion dollar organizations such as Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York, and SFJAZZ, in San Francisco, remain the exceptions in the low-budget world of jazz).

So when the stage lights go up Thursday night for Millennium Park's third annual "Made in Chicago" jazz series, a brilliantly programmed lineup underwritten by the Chicago Jazz Partnership, audiences once again can witness how this novel funding approach has altered the musical landscape of this city."

Read the whole thing here.

* And finally, The Onion recently ran a humor piece called "No one sets out to be a smooth jazz musician" that's good for a few chuckles, even (or maybe especially) for those who particularly enjoy that genre of music.

Pollstar: Bad Plus to return to Bistro in 2008

According to information just posted on Pollstar, the Bad Plus will be returning to St. Louis next year for another four-night stand at Jazz at the Bistro. The online tour information service now shows the NYC-based trio scheduled to play the Bistro from January 2 - 5, 2008, following up on their debut at the club earlier this year.

As always, readers are reminded that advance information from Pollstar is subject to change, and should not be considered confirmed until announced by the venue or presenter.

UPDATE - 4/18/07, 10:36 a.m.: A couple of days after posting this item, I ran across a couple of Bad Plus-related items of interest: a free MP3 download of the band's cover version of the Rush song "Tom Sawyer", and the electronic press kit for their upcoming CD release prog, which can be seen in the embedded video window below.