‘Complex Emotions’ on Christmas: The Bad Plus returns for Dakota jazz club residency
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For nearly a quarter-century straight, avant-garde jazz outfit The Bad Plus has played a late December residency at The Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis.
“The Twin Cities have always been a great support system of the band, and it’s just become kind of a holiday tradition, even though it’s not a holiday show, which is kind of cool,” says drummer Dave King. “We don’t play holiday music. We don’t intone that the holiday is going on at all.”
The band was originally formed in Minnesota in 2000, but has been based in New York for years. This year, they will travel back to perform seven shows starting the night of Christmas Day and continuing through Dec. 28.
“It’s become a thing everybody looks forward to in the band, to be in one city for four nights,” King says. “It’s just a beautiful, heartening thing to consider that we keep doing it, and everybody keeps coming out. It keeps selling out, and it’s just fantastic. You see the same people for years and years and years and years and years and years making it part of their family tradition.”
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The residency is a seasonal palate cleanser, King says, after months of holiday music. The band will perform old songs as well as music from the new record, “Complex Emotions,” which was released in November. The Bad Plus recorded the record at Pachyderm Recording Studio in Cannon Falls, Minn. — the same studio where Nirvana recorded “In Utero” and P.J. Harvey recorded “Rid of Me.”
They came back to Minnesota to record, King says, because the band wanted to work with Twin Cities engineer Brett Bullion.
It’s the band’s second album since transitioning from a piano trio to a quartet, featuring founding bassist Reid Anderson alongside new members guitarist Ben Monder and tenor saxophonist Chris Speed.
The quartet released a self-titled album in 2022 before performing live in their new configuration. “Complex Emotions” feels more “lived-in,” says King, after a few years of touring.
The recording process was unique because the band played together closely in the same room, with no headphones and only some sound baffling between members.
“The whole point was: We were trying to play very naturally to document those years on the road,” King says. “It ended up being very challenging, actually, and very rewarding at the end of the day. I've never done that before.”
