[Review/Listen] – BADBADNOTGOOD – “BBNG”

“Alex, how do you feel about Giant Steps?”

“Fuck that shit, everyone’s played it, it’s 50 years old, it sounds like crap, write a new song, and stop playing that God damn song. I don’t care if you can fucking modulate it and change shit up, you can play it in seven, you can play it in nine: it’s fucking boring. That’s what I think about Giant Steps.”

This little conversational snippet comes right at the close of BADBADNOTGOOD’s debut album “BBNG”, and it’s pretty much a mission statement for the Canadian jazz trio. It might seem a little rich for drummer Alex Sowinski to demand “a new song” at the end of an album that consists mainly of covers, but BADBADNOTGOOD are unoriginal in an original way. These guys, sick of traditional jazz and the same old hackneyed standards, essentially ask the question: we’ve got jazz standards, why can’t we have hip-hop standards? If the idea of a standard is that listeners can appreciate what’s new in each artist’s take on a song because they already know the tune, it makes perfect sense for standards to change along with the tunes that we can remember. So BADBADNOTGOOD impose their smooth-jazz sound on modern artists who’ve influenced them, artists like Flying Lotus, Nas, Gang Starr, and Koji Kondo.

Koji Kondo? He composed the score for The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, in case you don’t know, and BADBADNOTGOOD have combined three tunes from that soundtrack into a preposterously brilliant medley for the album’s penultimate track: “Title Theme / Saria’s Song / Song Of Storms”. The Title Theme and Saria’s Song are nice enough – one is floaty and delicate, the other is the epitome of chilled – but it’s the Song of Storms that really takes off, with the melody blasting in on bass and hints of Brubeck in the stabbed chords of Matt Tavares’s climactic piano solo. Depending on your level of nostalgia for the chunky, polygonal, 1998 version of Hyrule, this track will either be merely the crowning moment of “BBNG”, or it will be a musical black hole, the one track you listen to repeatedly at the expense of all the others.

That would be a shame, because there’s a whole lot to like on this album. There are some real gems among the covers, including a sliky smooth take on Slum Village’s “Fall In Love” which opens with some Bill Evans-esque meandering before bringing in the original beat oh-so-slowly, and a recreation of Flying Lotus’s “Camel” that’s impressive if only because, listening to the original, you’d be hard pressed to imagine it being played on conventional instruments. Of the original material on here, “Improvised Jam” is probably the finest. Being exactly what its title suggests, but the three guys get heavier and cut looser here than anywhere else on the album. It’s real attention grabbing stuff.

So while their actually playing style may not be that original, the novelty of BADBADNOTGOOD’s approach goes some way: jazz fans, hip-hop fans, video game fans – all should find something to love on “BBNG”. Plus, if you swing by BADBADNOTGOOD’s Bandcamp page, you can download the whole thing for absolutely nothing, so there are really no excuses. Check ‘em out. I urge you.

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