David King (drums), Ethan Iverson (piano) and Reid Anderson (bass), the three multifaceted musicians that make up The Bad Plus, will settle into Davis for four nights starting Wednesday before continuing what seems to be their umpteenth international tour.

Their music has been described as “avant-garde” “audacious” and “badass.” Preferring to perform in more intimate venues to eliminate the anonymity of larger concert halls, The Bad Plus rotates from jazz clubs to smaller auditoriums, hoping the range will allow them to play for a variety of responsive audiences.

Their most recent album, Never Stop, is their first to feature all original compositions with each member contributing works that showcase their individual talents and versatility as artists.

The Aggie was lucky enough to chat with drummer David King over the phone while he was home in Minneapolis between tour dates and get a preview of what they plan to bring to Davis this week.

AGGIE: Some people, after listening to your material for the first time, have trouble attributing your music to a specific genre. How would you classify your material to a new listener?

KING: I would call us a modern jazz group. I think improvising is one of the key elements of the music. If I was going to be pretentious, I would say we’re a creative group — a jazz group of our era. [Classic] jazz captures the culture of that era in the text. We are stating that [today] there is a lot of text to work with as a composer and that ignoring that is a sort of fake purity. We are three distinct composers and each one of us is an improviser. I’m comfortable calling us a jazz group, but I’m uncomfortable limiting us to what jazz is. To be honest, we don’t care what it is. We’ve all been through a jazz-snob period. And then, at the end of the day, you just want to make good music. We are an instrumental group — getting music out and getting an audience is hard enough as it is. Whatever people want to call it, it’s fine. It’s whatever you want it to be. If you want to call this shit straight ahead jazz, then that’s cool.

You’re playing four shows in the Vanderhoef Studio Theater next week, which seats 250. It seems that you generally prefer to play in smaller auditoriums.

We definitely do. Smaller venues are much more appropriate for sharing music of this nature. But with our group, it’s interesting — the music has such breadth that we can accommodate different types of venues. Jazz bands can’t do rock venues, rock venues can’t do jazz clubs … our versatility allows us to do both. We try to spread it out. Some people are uncomfortable in the rock club thing … so we keep mixing it up so that we can get as many people we can to hear the music.

What is your role within The Bad Plus? How do you contribute and how has that developed over the past decade with The Bad Plus?

It’s all been the same. We all volley … we all have type A leader personalities, but somehow it works. We trade roles onstage and off stage. If one of us needs to stand up and steer the ship, we’ll do it. When you tour as much as we do, you really develop this really deep language … not just anyone can play this stuff. When we play for you, that’s what we’re trying to get across. In some other groups, if the drummer is sick or something and you have another drummer sit in, it’s not really going to sound that much different. That’s not possible with us.

What influence, if any, do you hope to have on young musicians today?

Well, you never say, “I’m in the world to make sure people think like I do.” But I would hope that people appreciate the craft of making music. These are real instruments that we are playing, not manipulated by anything. I would hope people will take away [the idea] that you can take an old instrument and do new things with it. Real, natural acoustic musicians are important to keep in the culture. To me, it’s really exciting that people will want to be a part of [maintaining that]. Nothing against music made with computers – there’s been some great music produced using computers – but there’s no video game that can teach you how to play the drums really well. There’s no shortcut to becoming a great saxophonist. When you’re in the room with someone playing the saxophone, you’re listening to the product of the work they have devoted their lives to. That’s something we’re inspired by … we want to be part of that experience rather than part of a fashion.

LANI CHAN can be contacted at features@theaggie.org.

To a lot of people I know, Coachella is something like a religious experience. To them it’s not simply a weekend, but the weekend, where much of the various pleasure of life culminates into three days of chaotic hand-grabbing and reaching for fistfuls of entertainment and glory in the form of something like musical enlightenment. It is, in that, vaguely spiritual in nature — a type of mecca toward the grand mesh of hyper-debauchery, music, sex, drugs and whatever else one can jam into what seems, by its conclusion, a very short three days in the desert of Indio.

Coachella 2012, weekend one, was my first Coachella but probably not my last. I jammed a lot into my three days: bearing witness to the very brief resurrection of Tupac, Radiohead exploding heads with their absurdly superb talent (metaphorically) and the mad house that was Super Tall Paul, probably the most bizarre thing, let alone performance, I’ve ever seen (for you weekend two kids, go check him out Sunday morning at like 3 a.m. — you will not be disappointed).

There’s so much more, though, that slips through the hands of a single Coachella experience, and one leaves with the feeling that, as much as you got your greedy, dirty fingers on, you didn’t get enough. I say so because there is always more to be had at Coachella. More beer. More drugs. More music. More. More. MORE.

We want all the festival.

Strangely, Coachella is sad and infuriating in this way. That is, there is a pervading sense of loss that runs like a current through much of the festival in that it is a temporary island, or a fleeting retreat, and everyone knows it.

Yet there we all find ourselves trying desperately, it seems, to latch onto that which we all know will soon be over, like a one-night stand extended graciously to three where in the morning you’re sent packing, back into the real world that is, by comparison, drab and cold.

Or, more grandly and poetically, Coachella is like a microcosm of youth expiring toward old age. Practically every direction one looks there is a horrifying sense of struggle against the nature of brevity, a terrifying “this will soon be over and we will be old and burnt out” sensibility that is always resisted but acknowledged in every facet of the event. You can see it in the faces. You feel it in the energy. You think it yourself.

I realized this most poignantly during my second day, toward the end of the night when Coachella was more than half over – during Bon Iver – which was fitting, given all his wistful melancholy.

My friends wanted to leave during Bon Iver’s set. Not because he wasn’t excellent. He was. He was phenomenal, transcendent and haunting. He and his band were pouring out their souls, directly it seemed, from somewhere deep in their heaving chests — a bunch of guys expressing the most genuine kind of sorrow and beauty.

Yet just over the way someone else we wanted to see was teasing us with a promise of more. So we went and turned our backs on Bon Iver, which felt foolish to me at the time because why would we leave when he was so good? Where are we rushing to? Why would we walk out on that?

Because, the promise of something profound was just over the way and we were foolish and greedy enough to think we might find it there. Did we? I don’t know. Everywhere we went was good, but so was everywhere we left.

Of course if that is my greatest complaint, that there is too much good, that the festival is overwhelming and maddening because we can’t have it all, that it ends too soon, that it reminds me of the fleetingness of enjoyment and life and youth, it is an awfully flimsy one. Or is it?

My advice would be, though, don’t treat the festival like a checklist. You can’t see all the performers. Rushing from one to the other and trying to catch stints of each set, which some attempt, struck me as a futile and ultimately unsatisfactory endeavor.

Many of the performers are true artists on stage, and their sets are worth their entirety.

Radiohead, probably the best set of the weekend, was so organic and passionate I could not sing along with the lyrics I’ve had memorized for years. Some tried, but Thom Yorke’s vocals are simply alien — they are not replicable by us mortals.

M83, also, was so excellent I found myself in an idiotic stupor that was something like awe. They surpassed all my weighty expectations, and I found myself asking afterward if they are aware how much better they are than practically everyone else.

All in all Coachella is a lot of fun, but it can’t be sustained. It’s a massive feast, and by the end you ought to feel full to bursting. I did. Yet at the same time, I wanted more. It’s funny, and maybe a little sad, that Coachella allows you to be unrepentantly greedy in that way.

JAMES O’HARA can be contacted at arts@theaggie.org.

The Fashion and Design Society (FADS), a segment of the department of design here at UC Davis, will be hosting their annual runway show for Picnic Day 2012. This year’s fashion show is headed by Professor Susan Taber Avila and her Signature Collections course.

FADS and the show are supported by the President’s Undergraduate Fellowship. Nineteen design students will be presenting their work for this year’s event. It will include several separate categories; these categories include the Single Garment Competition in which designers and students alike are allowed to showcase any clothing that emphasizes personal expression. Under the personal expression portion of the show, students will showcase designs inspired by their work and research in cultural, historical or environmental emphasis.

Nidia Trejo, a senior double major in design and textiles and clothing, has contributed to the fashion show for three years. “I hope it brings attention to the design department,” Trejo said. “It was only a program before so it was a pretty big deal when they made it into a department recently.”

Trejo will be working with electronic textiles and will be presenting an LED dress. That will be just one of the many innovative designs that will be showcased this year.

This year will also include clothing inspired by Middle Eastern and African cultures.

“My collection intends to broaden public awareness of textiles,” said Faizan Dar, a senior design major. “I have captured the rich complexity and the ultimate height of luxury in Mughal court design by using traditional hand-dyed floral patterns, rich color and luscious embellishments.”

The highlight of recent fashion shows as well as this year’s includes the Red Dress showcase. This portion of the event also serves to raise awareness of health issues relating to women previously sponsored by the Women’s Cardiovascular Medicine Program.

This year will also include a brand new portion of the show in the form of an honor thesis portion. The Honor Thesis portion will include several garments designed by Helen Trejo and Miquette Elliot, two students working on their honor theses in the design department.

“I am debuting my zero-waste collection where I use the entire length and width of fabrics to eliminate textile waste that is typically generated in the clothing-making process,” said Helen Trejo, co-president of FADS and senior design major. “I created this collection as part of my design honors thesis and have worked very closely with Professors Ann Savageau and Susan Avila to learn as much as possible.”

Check out the FADS Inspired Innovation: Signature Collections UC Davis Picnic Day fashion show which will be held in Freeborn Hall. It starts at 1:30 p.m. $5 general admission, $3 with student ID.

RUDY SANCHEZ can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.

Jenn Rawling and Basho Parks are an indie-folk duo hailing from Oregon. The duo recently released their debut full-length album titled Take the Air. Their new album, full of emotionally lifting songs enhanced by Rawling’s poetic lyrics, is named after the Victorian period idiom of “to go for a stroll,” which also carried the air of seizing life by the hands and dancing merrily together. Currently, the two are touring through the Western and Midwestern states promoting the album and will be playing a live show at Armadillo Music on April 24. But before then, the outgoing duo was able to do an interview to talk more about themselves and their upcoming show in Davis.

MUSE: Can you give a small introduction of yourselves to our readers?

RAWLING & PARKS: We’re a couple from Oregon hitting the road in earnest as an indie-folk duo with our 10-year-old great dane, Miles Zanzibar.  We started flirting with one another while in dingy basement band practices exactly two years ago in April.

What would you describe your music as?

Our music is classical, folk, Americana, roots, steeped in the acoustic listening rooms of the Pacific Northwest and poured as a savory, heartfelt broth on top of your long day.

What are some artists who have inspired you as a group?

Jenn’s mom was very inspirational growing up, singing in the kitchen and whatnot. Basho’s grandfather was an opera singer, and his grandmother was a concert pianist in Dallas. We’re inspired by Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, Petunia & the Vipers, our friends The Haunted Windchimes from Pueblo and The Birds of Chicago from Chicago.

What is your new album all about?

Take the Air is all about perseverance in the face of human tragedy, the loss of love and the discovery of mudskippers. It’s about the details of nature, seizing the moment and salamander-worship.

How do you go about writing songs?

Our songwriting is intuitive and organic. We don’t try to fit a song into any one genre or theme — letting it come about in a more spontaneous fashion, without the traditional parameters of “verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-done” to hinder that process.  Basho also does a small dance of joy before we sit down in a trance and hum like mosquitoes.

What is your favorite part about creating music?

Playing music is a fantastic way to build lasting friendships the world over. Music creation is the ethereal sculpture-making of the soul’s voice.  Connecting with the creative process, capturing the songs and then sharing them.

Take the Air is your debut album, but you’ve been in bands together previously. How does this record differ from previous projects, and what did you learn from working together previously to make this a stronger record?

We played together in two other bands before going all-in for this duo project. Our time spent in countless rehearsals as well as playing a ton of gigs together helped cement our cohesion together as musical partners.  Take the Air is unlike the previous genres of music we played together; it has a much more quiet, folk-Americana style, whereas our other bands were louder and less metered. We’re glad to be playing this stripped-down music, as it’s much easier on the ears.

You tour as a duo, but the record has a lot more instrumentation on it.  How do you pull it off live?

Jenn will sing and play her guitar, while Basho will play mandolin and violin and sing in our sets while on the road. The pared-down version is actually quite full-sounding.

What are your plans following this tour?

More touring! We’ll get back to Oregon June 8, stay in town for three weeks and then head up to British Columbia for a month-long tour. Returning to Portland to refuel our whatever in early August, so we can head back out to the midwest for Folk Alliance and festivals (September and early October) so we can then meander over to New England in late October. November we’ll be back in the studio recording 14 tracks for the next album.  We’ll be in the Southeastern US for a spell in December.  2013 is already getting full.

MICHELLE RUAN can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.