DI AB OL IC AL BEATS
Canadian jazz-prodigy trio BadBadNotGood brings a fresh new-school hip-hop sensibility to the classic artform.
by Ronnie Reese photography by Connor Olthuis
There’s a lot more good than bad when it comes to writing about BadBadNotGood (BBNG). The only “bad,” actually, is the Canadian trio’s relative professional music inexperience. From their 2010 meeting in jazz college to the present day is a scant four years in which they’ve accomplished a lot, but hardly provides enough for a thousand- plus words of prose. The good—the really good, in fact—is that each member of the group is extremely bright, energetic, and loves to talk about music. That is, until, I ask them what they like to do when they aren’t playing music. “I don’t know,” says bassist Chester Hansen, twenty-two. Hansen seems to be the quietest of the three, much like George Harrison was the “quiet” Beatle, which is stellar company for Hansen. Drummer Alex Sowinski, twenty-two, who at one point during our four-man Skype session flat- out admits, “I talk a lot,” unexpectedly goes dead silent. Keyboardist Matt Tavares, twenty- three, son of two accountants, finally offers a response to the “What do you like to do when not playing music?” question, an answer that is fundamentally the BBNG motto: “Play more music.” Not a surprise. They’re musicians, and music fans, but most important, they’re fans of each other as musicians. All are prodigies, and all are multi-instrumentalists. In addition to keys, Tavares plays saxophone—and he claims Hansen plays piano better than he does. Hansen also plays guitar. In addition to drums, Sowinski plays piano and guitar; but in comparison to his bandmates, he
idea of trying to be expressive on a smaller, harmonic medium.” The love that BBNG didn’t get from their instructors they eventually found on YouTube after posting “The Odd Future Sessions Part 1.” This three-year-old video of the medley performed for their Humber assignment has earned close to 550,000 views to date, and comments ranging from lavish praise (“This is brilliant”) to freak- outs (“pulling buckies to this song. oh fuck”) to favorable snark (“This shit sucks... says the person who has never played an instrument”). Disappointment became elation as the trio collectively decided to leave school and embark on a career in professional music, which meant rehearsing and practicing daily, learning and recording new music, and playing as many live shows as possible. “Everything has been super enjoyable,” Tavares says.“There’s definitely been a large grind, but it’s the best job in the world, because we’re three friends who get to express ourselves with our instruments.” Much of the initial BBNG allure came though their use of cover songs, a staple of jazz tradition and to the group, akin to 1960s rock artists covering the blues and Bob Dylan. Their first two albums, BBNG and BBNGLIVE , both released on Bandcamp in 2011, feature overlapping live and studio versions of tracks from Odd Future, Nas, Slum Village, A Tribe Called Quest, and Waka Flocka Flame. On their third LP, 2012’s BBNG2 , the group mixes genre- blurring original pieces with reworkings of songs by Kanye West, Feist, James Blake, and My BloodyValentine.
says,“I play the least amount of instruments competently besides drums.” The three met at Toronto’s Humber College School of Creative and Performing Arts, jazz students who bonded over their love of hip-hop. “The music that we were listening to at the time was a bit different than a lot of people in jazz school,” Sowinski says of their classmates, who were more in tune to modern jazz and the NewYork club scene. Their teachers, many of whom were folk musicians and session players from the 1980s and ’90s, cared even less about hip- hop, or at best, knew very little of the genre past Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. “Which is a shame,” Tavares says, “because [hip-hop] is an incredible genre of music, and I feel like especially in this weird academic bubble that jazz education lives in, it just totally gets neglected.” The disconnect didn’t stop BBNG from reworking Odd Future’s “Bastard,” “Orange Juice” (which is the beat to Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade”), and “AssMilk” into a medley for an end-of-year performance at Humber, which was grossly misunderstood by the school’s music cognoscenti. The claim was the piece had “no musical value,” Tavares says. The group says this happened for two reasons: unfamiliarity with the source material, and the simplicity of what they were playing. Lost in transmission was the realization that the minimalism of the BBNG approach was influenced by the same basic, modal jazz—“serious” jazz—that their instructors and classmates revered. “A hip-hop song that’s one or two chords is really no different than a lot of traditional jazz,” Sowinski says.“It’s the same
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