We will never stop returning to Stravinsky's savage, gleaming The Rite of Spring, and enterprising (or foolhardy) musicians will never stop reimagining it. Whether it was the Pacific Symphony's 2013 "ReRite", the Metropolis Ensemble's "The Rite: Remixed", Darryl Brenzel's big band jazz version, or Golem's death metal take, new entrants regularly succumb to the impulse to fiddle with Stravinsky's era-shaping masterwork, and now the Bad Plus are stepping up to the plate. The jazz trio won acclaim by twisting hard rock and punk songs into jazz language, a trick riddled with steep hazards: cleverness on one side, and terminal lameness on the other. The trio, sure-handed and steely, evaded both traps, folding Davie Bowie, Queen, and Rush covers alongside their own compositions.
Tackling Stravinsky's Rite arises fresh hazards. They no longer risk accusations of novelty, but they also enter, for the first time, a crowded field. And while no sane person would refer to the task of transposing the entirety of the orchestral Rite into jazz trio as "easy", they also wander much closer to jazz-friendly language when engaging with Stravinsky's work. The composer was thrilled and enraptured by jazz rhythms and harmonies, and jazz musicians worshiped Stravinsky. (Pretty much everyone worshiped Stravinsky.) So what happens when the Bad Plus make the closest they've come to a "conventional" decision?
The premonitory shudder of the opening woodwind line, which bandleader Ethan Iverson brings under both hands of the piano, is a promising beginning. The piano notes refract in the mix in the mix like light through a water glass, and after a minute or so, some tasteful, if slightly dated, electronics enter. They have an air-conditioned, late-'90s trip-hop feel to them, and they are the first sign of rocky waters ahead. It's not that there's anything inappropriate about electronics: Some of the Bad Plus's touches that might sound gimmicky on paper, like a sampled female voice uttering a sharp intake of breath during the "Introduction" section, are its most vivid moments. This is a ballet about the thrilling violence of young lust, after all.
The trouble is that the electronics feel pat, and slightly obvious, and they signal that for the first time in their career, the Bad Plus are simply outgunned. The contemplative, brooding sections of Stravinsky's ballet translate the best—the yearning tug of the chords in "Spring Rounds" translate into dark glowing left-hand work. Double bassist Reid Anderson creeps on cat feet during the "Evocation of the Ancestors/Ritual Action of the Ancestors" movement, while drummer Dave King bows some effectively eerie whines on the cymbals.
But the fiercest sections suggest that the Bad Plus just aren't a match for the full blast of Stravinsky's orchestra. "The Augurs of Spring" is one of the most menacing moments in 20th-century music, in which the orchestra lands on a tendon-crunching composite chord dozens of times, the thudding downbeat a throw rug constantly disappearing beneath your feet. In the Pierre Boulez recording with the Cleveland Orchestra from 1969, these hits feel stunning, inhuman, like steel hammers hitting dead flesh. Banged on the low-end of the piano with Dave King's kick drum to support it, the section sounds almost...dinky. The Rite can be all kinds of things—breathless, lustful, pitiless—but "dinky" can never be one of them.
The feat is still impressive, in an athletic way. The trio have been mapping out this version in concert for years, and you could never accuse them of scaling this mountain without planning ahead of time. But the Rite should elicit gasps, not cock eyebrows—the latter of which is the most extreme reaction the Bad Plus manage to provoke. It's ironic that after tackling (and matching) Black Sabbath and Nirvana, it would be Stravinsky that would finally make the Bad Plus sound positively tame.
