Ethan Iverson

photo by Jimmy Katz

Ethan Iverson is best known as a founding member of The Bad Plus, a game-changing collective with Reid Anderson and David King. The New York Times called TBP “…Better than anyone at melding the sensibilities of post-60’s jazz and indie rock.” TBP has performed in venues as diverse as the Village Vanguard, Carnegie Hall, and Bonnaroo; collaborated with Joshua Redman, Bill Frisell, and the Mark Morris Dance Group; and created a faithful arrangement of Stravinky’s The Rite of Spring and a radical reinvention of Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction.

In addition to TBP, Iverson participates in the critically-acclaimed Billy Hart quartet with Mark Turner and Ben Street and occasionally performs with an elder statesman like Albert “Tootie” Heath or Ron Carter. For a over decade Iverson’s blog Do the Math has been a repository of musician-to-musician interviews and analysis, which is surely one reason Time Out New York selected Iverson as one of 25 essential New York jazz icons: “Perhaps NYC’s most thoughtful and passionate student of jazz tradition—the most admirable sort of artist-scholar.”

In 2017 Iverson composed and arranged “Pepperland” for the Mark Morris Dance Group and curated a major centennial celebration of Thelonious Monk at Duke University.

In addition to his jazz activities Iverson has a inquisitive professional relationship to classical music. He less interested in forcing a blend of jazz and classical than understanding and assimilating these diverse traditions at a genuinely sophisticated level. With MMDG he played Robert Schumann chamber music with Yo-Yo Ma; for the release of The Rest is Noise he toured with Alex Ross and performed examples of 20th-century repertoire.

Program Note:

Iverson’s first orchestral work, Concerto to Scale, will be of modest dimensions but of sincere intent, a fully notated work in a tuneful and neoclassical style: Allegro, Andante, and Rondo.