Badbadnotgood Spark Ideas for Their New Album

Canadian Jazz Trio Badbadnotgood Spark Ideas for Their New Album in the Red Bull Studio Auckland

The Red Bull Studio Auckland was treated to a concentrated session from Canadian instrumental jazz trio BadBadNotGood, after they touched down in New Zealand to play at shows in Auckland and Wellington in the weekend.

The group’s impressive work rate shows no sign of slowing; they recently played at the Glastonbury festival and have a new album due out next year. They used their window of time at the Red Bull Studio to get some fresh ideas down.

“This week’s awesome because the studio was already booked out for us before we arrived,”

“We’ve been working on a couple more ideas that we can take home and use to finish the album, which is awesome because we haven’t had a whole lot of time to just sit down and be like, ‘Okay, how can we change this section or flip this?’,” says Hansen.

“We’ve already hit on some ideas too,” Tavares continues. “The juices are flowing.”

The trio tweeted New Zealand artist Lorde asking to make some beats, hoping to get the attention of Cheltenham Beach’s finest. Lorde’s yet to hit reply, but you can’t help but wonder what her songs would sound like in the very capable hands of the three jazz school-trained musicians who have rebuilt tracks from artists as diverse as Joy Division, Waka Flocka Flame, Feist and James Blake.

Take Waka Flocka’s ‘Hard in da Paint’ with its perfectly concise, hard-as-nails beat: BadBadNotGood’s retooled version takes a vocal sample from Waka and then riffs on the menacing melody that powers the Lex Luger-produced instrumental.

BadBadNotGood’s radical reinventions of this and other certified bangers plus their own original material has caught the attention of rap heavyweights like Tyer, The Creator, Frank Ocean and DOOM, and all three have gone on to work with the Toronto natives.

While Tavares and co lounge in the control room, taking a break from the sessions, the five-strong Auckland rap collective SuperVillains (RMC) mill around just beyond the glass, ready to make some music with their new Canadian compadres. Tavares says the connection was only made the night before, and they’re ready to see how it plays out in studio.

“We met those dudes when we played a DJ set,” he says. “We might just play some tunes back and forth with them and see what gels. Because we’ve got this time here, we want to keep the creative energy going and see what happens.”

Whether their Toronto-meets-Auckland jam will yield any new material remains to be seen, but BadBadNotGood already have a nearly-minted new album ready for release. While it’ll be a mainly all-instrumental affair, expect to see a trifecta of top tier guest spots when the record sees the light of day.

“It’s going to be called BBNG3, I believe,” says Sowinski. “We don’t have a release date, but it’ll definitely be early 2014. We’ve still got to shine some things on it.”

“We want it to be perfect,” adds Hansen. “It needs to be an encapsulation of everything we’ve done up till now.”

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