Since Bitches Brew in 1969, the jazz story has been one of blending, sharing and shaping. It has been a story of fusion.

Not necessarily jazz fusion (a “genre” that some separate from jazz itself), but fusion as an artistic concept. The combining of elements is a natural evolutionary process, one that affects the development of everything people create — every social artifact. Just as media have merged and concepts have crossed, music is ever blended and reshaped. Musical styles interact with each other, often combining (however slowly) to create something new.

And then there are the interactions with pop culture, which are entirely different.

Jazz and pop have had a long history together. Jazz was the first real pop music. Unless you count ragtime, classical music and show tunes (which enjoyed some limited popularity), jazz emerged as the first popular musical form in the 1920s, fueled by the development of a national consciousness (thanks to big media and technology) and the availability of recorded music.

Jazz was eventually pushed to the background again, though this time it was a cool underground, not an insurgent rebellion. There it stayed for years — but jazzers never forgot what pop was all about.

Over time, jazz musicians began to co-opt pop as a part of their vocabulary. Miles Davis was a great admirer of (and almost a collaborator with) Jimi Hendrix before the great guitarist’s death, and friends with Prince in the late ’80s. Even Phil Collins took to playing drums in Brand X, a jazz-fusion group.

Today, pop covers are standard repertoire for nearly every jazz artist. Consider the musicians mentioned in my past columns — Béla Fleck did The Beatles’ “Michelle,” Medeski Martin and Wood covered “Hey Joe” and Brad Mehldau (who I discussed last time around) is fond of covering Radiohead’s somber works.

Amid this climate, Midwestern piano trio The Bad Plus doesn’t seem like much of a shocker. The BP arrived with a major label release (These Are The Vistas) earlier this year, and grabbed attention almost immediately for — what else — their interesting pop cover choices.

While most jazzers are happy to slide with tunes by the Beatles and Hendrix, The BP has gone modern, covering “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” on Vistas, and even springing for “Every Breath You Take” in concert.

Jazz fans might question this move. Is the integration of pop and jazz truly an attempt to create new art by recycling old art (musical culture jamming, anyone?), or just a stale revisitation of the same old jazz-pop relationship? Or, worse yet, is it just a stunt? Must jazz musicians resort to gimmicky cover tricks to get attention in today’s pop-obsessed world?

If the members of The Bad Plus are looking for attention, they’ve found it.

Playboy Magazine featured the members of the band in one of its famous interviews earlier this year. The topic? The intersection of jazz and pop, why they used rock songs on their album and whether they think jazz musicians must play rock to get noticed.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran a Sept. 11 feature on the band under the headline “Bad Plus delivers pop tunes as jazz.” Besides the somewhat de-legitimizing tone of the headline (“pop tunes as jazz” — what, like they’re pretending?), what’s important is that people only seem to care about The Bad Plus because they are odd and somewhat controversial (translation: an acoustic jazz trio playing pop and rock cover tunes).

Many musicians I’ve spoken with seem to have a negative feeling about the incorporation of pop into jazz music. When Vistas made it into my collection and I started listening, my friends (both rock and jazz musicians alike) said they “hated it when jazz groups do that,” and saw it as a gimmick more than a legitimate artistic concept.

Maybe there is some kind of leftover anonymity about what happened to jazz in the ’50s — “if jazz was still popular, these groups wouldn’t have to use pop to get attention today” — but that’s just a guess (and it would be tough for this kind of sentiment to have survived for 50 years, especially since most of the musicians I know are in their 20s).

Whatever the long-term effects on jazz and pop music happen to be, there is at least one foreseeable advantage to the recent coziness between the genres — exposing non-jazz fans to quality jazz music. Drummer David King feels that because of their music “there have been some serious jazz blinders removed that might lead to someone seeing us and then checking out the Clash or something.”

If it works this way, maybe it will work the other way as well — grunge nostalgists will check out The Bad Plus because of their Nirvana cover, and fall in love with the band. Gimmick or not, the use of pop covers by jazz groups is sure to attract attention. And assuming we are confident with our music and our genre, attention can never be a bad thing.

John Zeratsky ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in Family and Consumer Journalism. Catch up with his previous columns and other writings on his website, at www.johnzeratsky.com.