Bad Bad Not Good: Not Your Regular Jazz Band

Toronto based jazz outfit Bad Bad Not Good have been a staple in my listening playlists over the years. They have something about them, I don’t know what it is, the way the play and the way their music sounds, it’s a unique style of jazz with roots and influences in hip-hop and experimental sounds, but remaining primordially a jazz-centric outfit.

Think John Coltrane, Travis Barker, Bill Evans, and Nas and Ella Fitzgerlad in a jam room creating a blend of jazz infused hip-hop, something that’s a culmination of the best bits of the jazz boom of the ’50s and the emergence of hip-hop in the late ’80s and ’90s.

Bad Bad Not Good have been around for nearly a decade. Their rise to popularity was no fluke. They’re exceptionally tight and they complement each other astutely while performing on stage.

They started off as a three piece unit — Matthew Tavares on keys, bassist Chester Hansen, and Alex Sowinski on drums. They later incorporated Leland Whitty on Saxophone, and occasionally collaborations with different musicians like Charlotte Day Wilson on vocals and others like Kaytranada, and Ghostface Killah rapping and most recently for their latest album ‘Talk Memory’ Brazilian jazz old timer Arthur Verocai.

However, Matt Tavares has quit the band after the pandemic, citing considerable burnout and to put out his own acoustic jazz solo album and with the rest of the band members agreeing that they need a bit of a break.

Tavares, Hansen and Sowinski met at jazz school in Toronto and connected over the same musical influences and began to jam together after school and their jam sessions and their first few recorded LPs went on to the internet and went viral and they subsequently amassed a huge fan following.

As explained by them on Losbangeles:

“We all met at jazz school in Toronto and connected over the same music. We had a random jam after school and decided to play hip-hop instead of jazz. Alex had to do a project for school that we weren’t too stoked on so we decided that instead of playing ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ we would play Odd Future, Gucci Mane and the stuff we were listening to at the time. Our buddy Sam thought it would be a good idea to film it, so he did and it went on the net.”

“(And then) Dropping out of school to pursue music and using all of the money we made touring to build our own studio because we had to leave Alex’s Dad’s basement.”

They released their first album ‘BBNG’ — a stellar introduction to their sound — in 2011 and made it freely downloadable and the band haven’t looked back since.

Perhaps their most famous and revered album is ‘III’ with classics such as ‘Hedron’ and ‘Can’t Leave The Night’ and of course that glorious sax motif by Whitty on ‘Confessions’.

They’ve since released a collab with Ghostface Killah called ‘Sour Soul’ which is an ideal example of their jazz x hiphop inter-junction and which is rap centric, and the LPs ‘IV’(2016) which has more vocals amidst the jazz, and as recent as last year in 2021, their new LP ‘Talk Memory’.

Describing Bad Bad Not Good’s sound is in a word, experimental. Much of their music is a huge experiment like three gifted kids from Canada locked up in a basement just vibing out, cooking up and concocting a grand chemistry experiment, think a Canadian Ed, Edd and Eddy in Dexter’s lab on crack cocaine, and man, do they have chemistry.

Their sound is evolving constantly, but their roots are firmly fixed in jazz. Their albums ‘BBNG’, ‘II’ and ‘III’ were all conceived rather quickly between 2011 and 2014, along with a lot of touring, which is perhaps why Tavares felt fatigued and jaded because of all the music they’ve been creating and performing non-stop.

And their gigs get pretty wild, as revealed by the band before one of their European tours:

We did this one J Dilla tribute concert where we played a whole set of our interpretations of his songs and it kept on getting rowdier and rowdier with people crowd surfing and dancing and having an amazing time. Towards the end of the show it got so rowdy that as Chester was taking a monster bass solo these girls came on stage and started grinding in front of him. First jazz show that we’ve been to where that’s happened.

‘Talk Memory’ is a much more jazz-centric sound with the band going in a more classical jazz direction and approach, perhaps because of the involvement of Verocai, but is a more ’50s sounding LP as compared to their earlier releases.

As explained on Exclaim:

Much of Talk Memory builds like a live set, as the ambient, moody tracks build in tempo and funkiness as the album nears its conclusion. With the departure of founding keyboardist Matthew Tavares, bassist Chester Hansen and saxophonist Leland Whitty each take over the piano and synthesizer throughout the LP. This leaves to a more wandering and less structured sound, as apparent of the adventurous Floating Points-produced nine-minute opener “Signal from the Noise” and the formless jazz floater “Timid, Intimidating.”

‘Talk Memory’ is the latest evolution in the BBNG sound, but not their best effort in my opinion, as compared to their earlier releases, with the void created by missing keyboardist Tavares largely apparent. However, I did like the tracks ‘Love Proceeding’ and ‘Timid, Intimidating’, and ‘Beside April(Reprise).’

Bad Bad Not Good are in a plateau phase as a band in their development, sound and popularity, so it’s interesting to see where the band goes from here.

Innovation is what the greatest bands like Radiohead etc., have brought and incorporated in their sound while of course staying rooted in their distinct process and trademark ideas and playing to their strengths.

But something I’ve not mentioned in this piece thus far is about how young they are. They’ve only been creating music in their 20s and as they approach their early 30s, there’s a diverse range of ways the band can go in the future.

However, since their formation in 2011, a year I fondly recollect, in my final year of college when I stumbled on to BBNG, the band have changed and recreated the very fabric and landscape of jazz in the 21st century, which is an appreciable and ingenuous in its formulation, but delightful to the ear in its execution.

Their innovation has paved the way for other experimental jazz outfits like Robohands, Hidden Orchestra, Portico Quartet, The Kilimanjaro Dark Jazz Ensemble to name a few, and others who are also taking up the experimental jazz mantle and who have put out brilliant releases.

It’ll be really interesting to see where Bad Bad Not Good and their jazz sound evolve, mutate and come alive and diverge to in the coming years, but their contribution to jazz as an unusual & unique jazz band remains strikingly impressive.

If you liked this post, you can buy me a cup of coffee by clicking the link below!