Join the Oxford American magazine for the inaugural concert in their 2014-2015 jazz series at South on Main featuring The Bad Plus! The OA jazz series is sponsored by the University of Central Arkansas College of Fine Arts and Communication. Doors open at 6:00 PM with dinner and drinks available at that time. The concert begins at 8:00 PM.

Ticket packages for the jazz series went on sale June 20 at www.metrotix.com, ranging from$120 to $80 and include a discount on service charges. Single tickets go on sale September 1at $30 for reserved seats at tables and $20 for general admission. Purchasing a reserved seat assigns you to a specific guaranteed seat at a table. However, seating at tables is family-style, and unless you purchase the entire table, you will be seated with other patrons. General admission tickets are good for barstools and standing room, available on a first-come first-served basis. For ticketing questions, please contact Metrotix at (800) 293-5949.

The Bad Plus has spent almost fifteen years redefining what a piano-bass-drums trio can and should be. They’ve reached audiences of all demographic stripes with an uncompromising body of original music (plus some ingenious, genre-jumping covers) and dedicated touring around the globe. On their eighth studio album, Made Possible, bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson, and drummer David King take their distinctive musical M.O. to captivating new heights, proving once again that the rules of musical convention are made to be broken.

“This band contains some of the most punk energy I’ve ever seen or felt as a musician — it just doesn’t need to do it so obviously,” King says. “That’s our statement. It’s a complex emotion.”

 Made Possible marks a palpable departure for The Bad Plus on a few fronts. Layers of synth and electronic drum sounds can be heard prowling amid the trio’s signature acoustic palette. Also, whereas the group’s new material typically gets a thorough road test before being recorded, these songs were brought in with looser expectations and even more potent possibilities. And for the first time since 2005’s Suspicious Activity?, the band chose to record far away from its Minnesota motherland, holing up instead at a remote studio in upstate New York.

“The Bad Plus are the Coen brothers of jazz: Midwesterners, both ironic and dead earnest, technically brilliant, beyond versatile, a little chilly sometimes, but funny, surprising, and pretty hard to pin down.”—The New Yorker