The Bad Plus, Chris Potter & Craig Taborn at TivoliVredenburg Utrecht: Tonight, April 9, 2026 — A Farewell Tour and a Keith Jarrett Tribute

Tonight matters.

The Bad Plus — one of the most significant and genuinely original jazz ensembles of the past 25 years — is playing their farewell tour, and on Thursday, April 9, 2026 at 20:15, that tour arrives at TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht. With them: Chris Potter on saxophone, one of the most celebrated saxophonists working in jazz today, and Craig Taborn on piano, one of the most searching and technically extraordinary pianists in contemporary improvised music.

The programme is a tribute to Keith Jarrett — the American pianist whose recorded catalogue is one of the most substantial bodies of work in the history of jazz, and whose influence on every musician in this room tonight is too deep and too varied to summarise in a sentence.

This is not a routine concert. It is a specific, once-in-a-career gathering of musicians performing a tribute to one of the greatest pianists who ever lived, in one of Utrecht's finest music venues, on one of the last nights of a band that has been defining what jazz can be since the year 2000.

Tickets at tivolivredenburg.nl. Tonight at 20:15.

The Bad Plus: 26 Years of Refusing the Expected

The Bad Plus was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2000 by three musicians who had met years earlier and shared a fundamental conviction about what jazz should be: not a museum piece, not an academic exercise, not a genre defined by its distance from popular music, but a living, irreverent, emotionally direct art form that could contain anything.

The original lineup — Reid Anderson (upright bass), David King (drums), and Ethan Iverson (piano) — built the band's reputation through a sequence of moves that the jazz establishment was not entirely prepared for. Their debut albums included full jazz arrangements of rock songs that were completely unironic and completely committed: Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", Rush's "Tom Sawyer", Radiohead's "Karma Police", and Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" — played not as novelty covers but as genuine musical investigations that revealed the structural and harmonic qualities of the original songs that casual listeners had never consciously noticed.

The response was polarising and commercially successful simultaneously — which is the response that any significant artistic position tends to generate. The Bad Plus were not doing what they were doing to be provocative. They were doing it because they genuinely believed that the wall between jazz and rock was an artificial construction, and that the best way to demonstrate this was to play the music itself.

The Recording History

Across more than two decades, The Bad Plus built a discography that documents the evolution of one of jazz's most distinctive voices:

• "The Bad Plus" (2001, Fresh Sound New Talent) — the debut; introduced the band's approach to a jazz world that had not seen anything quite like it
• "These Are the Vistas" (2003, Columbia Records) — the major label debut; the album that brought them to the widest audience; the version of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that made international music press sit up
• "Give" (2004, Columbia) — the follow-up that confirmed the band's compositional strength was not dependent on cover material
• "For All I Care" (2009) — a full album of rock and pop songs arranged for the trio, featuring vocalist Wendy Lewis; expanded the band's sonic palette significantly
• "Never Stop" (2010) — a full album of original compositions; arguably the work that demonstrated most convincingly that their identity was not defined by their cover material
• "Inevitable Western" (2014) and subsequent releases — continuing the evolution of a band that never settled

Ethan Iverson left the band in 2017 and was replaced by Orrin Evans, who subsequently also departed. Reid Anderson and David King — the two founding members who have been at the core of The Bad Plus throughout — continue as the band's centre.

The 2026 Farewell Tour

The announcement of The Bad Plus' farewell tour came in January 2026 — the confirmation that the band would end their quarter-century run in 2026, with a final touring programme that spans North America and Europe.

The farewell tour has two distinct formats:

The Chris Potter and Craig Taborn collaboration — the current European run, in which the two founding members (Anderson and King) are joined by Taborn and Potter for a specifically conceived programme performing Keith Jarrett's music; a tribute show that brings together four of the most significant improvising musicians working in jazz today in a concert explicitly designed as a farewell to one of the foundational figures of the music they have spent their careers developing

The summer format — further farewell dates continuing through 2026, including the Montréal Jazz Festival in June

The Utrecht show — April 9 at TivoliVredenburg — is one of the final European dates of the Chris Potter/Craig Taborn collaboration chapter of the farewell tour, after shows in Leuven, Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Barcelona, and Cenon. The following night, the same musicians play Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw.

Chris Potter: The Saxophone Voice of His Generation

Chris Potter is, by the consensus of both the jazz critical establishment and the practising musician community, one of the most important saxophone players in the world today — a musician whose technique, conception, and prolific output have made him a reference point for an entire generation of younger saxophonists.

Potter grew up in Columbia, South Carolina and came to international attention in the 1990s through his work in multiple jazz contexts — as a sideman with Dave Holland's Big Band, with Herbie Hancock, with Steely Dan (whose use of jazz-adjacent studio musicians gave Potter one of his wider commercial exposures), and across a string of recordings under his own name that documented a specific way of thinking about the saxophone's role in ensemble improvisation.

His tone on the tenor saxophone is immediately recognisable — warm in the middle register, precise and controlled in the upper range, and driven by an improvisational logic that builds ideas across long stretches of time rather than in the burst-and-reset pattern of more showmanlike players.

He has worked with Craig Taborn extensively in duo and small-group contexts, and his understanding of Taborn's pianistic language is deep enough that their interaction in the Utrecht programme will be built on years of musical conversation rather than the looser familiarity of musicians who have only recently begun playing together.

Craig Taborn: The Pianist Who Thinks in Architectures

Craig Taborn is the pianist for the farewell tour's Keith Jarrett tribute programme — and the casting is not incidental. Taborn is one of the most architecturally sophisticated pianists in contemporary jazz and improvised music: a musician whose thinking about harmony, texture, and time in performance shares with Jarrett a commitment to long-form improvised development rather than thematic statement-and-variation.

Taborn is known primarily through his recordings for ECM Records — the Munich-based label whose aesthetic of space, tone, and carefully considered sonic architecture has been the defining context for his solo and ensemble work. His solo album "Avenging Angel" (2011, ECM) — a single session of improvised solo piano — is one of the most technically and compositionally serious solo piano records in recent jazz history.

His presence in the Keith Jarrett tribute programme is logical: Taborn is one of the few pianists in the current generation who has the depth of harmonic imagination and the physical command of the instrument to approach Jarrett's music with full seriousness — not as a curator reproducing Jarrett's recorded performances, but as an improviser engaging with the same materials through his own fully formed musical personality.

Keith Jarrett: The Figure at the Centre of Tonight's Programme

Keith Jarrett — born in 1945 in Allentown, Pennsylvania — is the American pianist and composer whose recorded output across a career of more than five decades constitutes one of the largest and most varied bodies of work in the history of jazz.

His solo concert recordings are among the most famous in jazz history: the "Köln Concert" (1975, ECM Records) — recorded live at the Cologne Opera House on a battered, out-of-tune instrument that Jarrett initially refused to play — became the best-selling solo jazz album of all time, with sales exceeding 3.5 million copies. The Köln Concert is not simply a famous recording: it is evidence of what improvised music can be when a musician at the peak of their powers commits completely to a single long-form performance.

Jarrett's career has combined solo improvisation, the Standards Trio (with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums — his most consistent and long-running ensemble), and composed works for orchestra and chamber ensembles.

In 2018, Jarrett suffered the first of two strokes that significantly affected his left-side function and effectively ended his performing career. He has spoken in interviews about the specific quality of loss that the inability to play represents for a musician whose identity had been defined by the piano for over six decades.

The tribute that The Bad Plus, Chris Potter, and Craig Taborn are bringing to TivoliVredenburg tonight is a response to that loss — four musicians engaging with the music of a pianist whose career has been one of the defining threads of the genre they inhabit.

TivoliVredenburg: Utrecht's Finest Jazz Room

TivoliVredenburg is the cultural home of live music in Utrecht — a multi-hall complex at Vredenburgkade 11, 3511 WC Utrecht, opened in 2014, that houses five separately designed halls each acoustically optimised for different musical contexts.

The hall used tonight will be appropriate in scale and acoustic quality for the intimate jazz ensemble format — a room where the details of Taborn's piano voicing and Potter's tone are audible with the precision that this kind of music demands. Jazz at this level does not benefit from arena-scale venues: it needs a room where the musicians' interaction is palpable and the audience is close enough to experience the music as a shared act of listening rather than a spectacle.

Doors and accessibility:

TivoliVredenburg is directly adjacent to Utrecht Centraal station — 2 minutes on foot from any platform, making it reachable from Amsterdam (26 minutes by train), Rotterdam (40 minutes), The Hague (45 minutes), and Amsterdam Schiphol Airport (37 minutes).

Tonight at 20:15

The Bad Plus. Chris Potter. Craig Taborn. Keith Jarrett's music. TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht, tonight at 20:15.

One of the most significant jazz bands of the past 25 years, in the final year of their existence, with two of the most serious musicians in contemporary improvised music, playing a tribute to the pianist who has been one of the genre's defining figures for over half a century.

The Amsterdam show follows tomorrow, April 10, at Muziekgebouw. But tonight is Utrecht's. Tickets still available at tivolivredenburg.nl.

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