The first time pianist Orrin Evans sat down with his new jazz trio, the Bad Plus, about a year ago in Brooklyn, N.Y., bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King picked a 14-year-old original, “Big Eater,” which they’d played repeatedly and knew intimately. “You could feel the potential contained in that first moment,” Anderson recalls. “With Orrin, we can see that there are so many paths to explore musically and places to go improvisationally. We’re just at the very threshold of that.”
