The Bad Plus plays "Iron Man"

twenty one years ago

My friend John Meline sent me a text last night: “Looking forward to your obituary of the great improviser John Osbourne.”

It took a second before the penny dropped.

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While heavy metal is not a genre I know much about, a good riff is a good riff. The trombone section in high school band would play “Iron Man” in alternation with “Smoke on the Water.” When it came time to choose covers for the Bad Plus, I might have suggested “Iron Man” myself. We liked to be pretty obvious in our song selections, and nothing is more obvious than “Iron Man.”

I still like our 2004 recording from Give, the second Columbia album with Tchad Blake engineering. The opening cadenza (a bit in the György Ligeti ëtude tradition) was played on two pianos at the same time (there was an out-of-tune upright at Real World Studios). At the climax, the B minor riff is played in major, which is particularly satisfactory as the top melody is now a precise transposition of the riff to D-sharp minor. For the end, the old Gregorian chant “Dies Irae” (“Day of the Dead,” used by Liszt, Berlioz, Rachmaninoff, and many others) is placed under the fading guitar coda in F-sharp minor.

Reid Anderson, bass, and Dave King, drums.