INVESTING IN HUMAN HAPPINESS
Django Bates, a quirky creative powerhouse on the UK jazz scene since the 1980s, moved to Denmark to play and teach last year. In February he returns – but as a french horn player, in Copenhagen pianist Søren Nørbo’s group. JOHN FORDHAM discovered why the natural leader has turned sideman.
When he emerged on to the big stage with the late-lamented Loose Tubes in the mid-1980s, Django Bates sounded like a young man for whom the regular rules existed only as a guide to what to avoid.
Not that Bates’s compositions didn’t have their strong influences. The stirring South African sound of Dudu Pukwana and Chris McGregor was one; a form of bebop coming from a manic, Don Ellis-like angle was another; circus and cartoon music were in there, so was Keith Jarrett’s early-’70s quartet, and so was free-jazz - though often used as a raucous antidote to more orderly episodes. Bates clearly thought (like many of his Loose Tubes contemporaries) that however serious a pursuit musicmaking was, it couldn’t be too serious to get a laugh out of. But whatever restlessly varied materials he has explored over the past two decades, this amiably subversive artist has made every one of them his own.
Now, unexpectedly, he resurfaces as a willing and energetic participant in someone else’s music. Bates shifted locations from London’s Hackney to Copenhagen in 2005, when he was appointed Professor of Rhythmic Music at the Danish city’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory. For the upcoming UK tour in February, he is playing french horn with a trio led by one of the Conservatory’s graduates (and a one-time Duke Jordan student), pianist Søren Nørbo, launching the album Debates. Nørbo, who has worked with a variety of stars including Lee Konitz and Joakim Milder, formed the group in 1998. The Bates connection happened six years later, when the group decided to shortlist three musicians they would most like to go on a jazz adventure with. Django Bates was the first to respond.
‘I’d heard Søren’s first CD and knew about the group before I took up the post in Copenhagen,’ Bates says. ‘I was looking for a way of keeping my horn-playing going, something that could give me a good reason to keep practising it every other day. And I could imagine being a horn player working with Søren’s trio, there seemed to be so much listening going on between them.’
Considering Django Bates’s unorthodox jazz career, however (not to mention such crossover departures as work with classical pianist Joanna MacGregor, the London Sinfonietta, or members of Radiohead), Debates exudes a relish for bop-based brass playing, and an affection for distinctly jazzy materials, that the Beckenham born musician hasn’t displayed so explicitly in a long time.
‘When I think about brass playing, I think Jimmy Knepper - I’m sure subconciously I’d go for that sound,’ Bates muses. ‘Then Clark Terry for that even, almost classical style, and I like Nat Adderley’s cornet playing. There’s also a bit of that African style of note-bending that comes from Mongezi Feza, and I used to sit behind Harry Beckett in Dudu Pukwana’s band which I’m sure left a mark, that unique sound of his. Of course, I’ve always been the great avoider of the bop routine, what I felt could become a jazz trap. But now enough years have passed for me to feel “OK, I’m allowed to do this”.
Debates is almost an orthodox jazz album, by previous Bates standards. This doesn’t, however, seem, like backward step for him.
‘I’m glad you think there’s a jazzy feel to the album,’ he smiles. ‘It reminds me in some ways of the early days of Iain Ballamy’s quartet playing at the old Bass Clef, that feeling of something rooted in bebop but with a theatrical or surreal edge that doesn’t come from America. Or musically, the Keith Jarrett group that had Paul Motian and Dewey Redman in it, where you got the feeling of jazz wanting to burst through its constraints, but still sometimes turning into that lovely thing we call swing. But if I do three gigs in a row with Søren, it’s amazing how little is repeated. When I play, I can feel his response to it. That’s often missing from jazz in this area.’
Though he’s an occasional visitor now, Django Bates is anxious to maintain what he calls ‘a musical and spiritual footing in the UK.’ He performed his Charlie Parker tribute, Bird Tableau, at the Vortex last summer, and the music for Titus Andronicus at the Globe Theatre. Shortly before Christmas, he was back at the Vortex for an all-star free-jazz gig with saxophonists Tim Berne and Evan Parker. The north London club, Bates’s local as a Hackney resident, is a favourite haunt for which he’d like to help build strong links with northern Europe.
‘The Vortex is one of the things about the UK scene I’m still tied to,’ Bates says. ‘It’s my kind of place. I was waiting for a gig to begin there, and looking round at the audience, and saw this group of people I wouldn’t have come across at any other venue. Open minded, ethnically mixed, age mixed, great sense of humour – a quintessentially eccentric English audience.’
He’s weary, however, of the constant funding difficulties, and enduring shortage of commitment and awareness about jazz and new music in the British arts establishment.
‘I grew up before Thatcherism, and then I saw a huge shift of emphasis toward the importance of profit in all things here. Denmark and other parts of Scandinavia still see the point of investing in human happiness, spiritually and artistically. That’s why you’ll see such great bands at festivals in Denmark, there’s investment and commitment behind them, without counting what the material return is going to be.’
Bates has a good deal of flexibility about living in two worlds, his work at the RMC being more catalytic and inspirational than rigidly tied to a timetable. The relationship has also evolved organically, over several years.
‘It came step by step,’ Bates says. ‘Loose Tubes played there, I was an artist in residence there, then I won the Jazzpar Prize, ran workshops, had an early relationship with the Rhythmic Music Conservatory back then. Then they wanted to raise their profile and be taken more seriously, and decided they ought to have a professor, so that turned out to be me.’
Jazz teaching on classical teaching premises may have come a long way since the notice ‘No jazz to be played on this piano’ drove Django Bates out of music college in the ‘80s, but Copenhagen’s RMC remains a completely different type of conservatoire. Devoted to the high compositional and technical standards the straight colleges espouse, it applies that expertise to the vast range of world-music that doesn’t live under the European classical roof.
‘Lots of conservatoires do a bit of jazz on the side,’ Bates agrees. ‘But it often feels just like that – on the side. It feels like music for the people at RMC, and it avoids the class issues that often affect classical music, the idea that only posh people play it. Some of the staff there are players like me, some are more academic. When I hear projects being rehearsed there, I think of my record collection - or my father’s record collection - and it has the same sort of range. I remember cycling in one morning and having the feeling that the whole place had been invented just for me. One day I decided I wanted to try something out for a choir, and in no time there were eight or nine people, all speaking different languages, who wanted to help.’
As well as working with the Nørbo trio, Bates also runs a band called Storm Chaser in Denmark, made up of musicians from the college. The band now has a residency at Copenhagen’s famous Jazz House. The regularity of the gig is obliging Django Bates to extend the band-book fast, and he’s even turning to arrangements of other composers’ pieces. A current favourite is from The Bad Plus repertoire - ‘very intense, lots of silence, lots of jagged entries. I thought it would be perfect for a big band.’ Bates even quite likes continuing to run his own independent record label - ‘you just have to check your emails regularly, and have enough stamps and envelopes to send the CDs out’.
Later in the year, he also has a gig at the Albert Hall with student dancers. But currently, the sideman role is suiting him just fine.
‘It’s different to being a sideman as a pianist, where you often find yourself becoming the arranger without intending to, obliged to invent a concept for the bandleader. Now I can just wander to the side of the stage to watch them play. I don’t have to worry about whether the next thing that’s supposed to happen will happen in the right place.’
The Søren Nørbo trio’s Debates, with Django Bates on french horn, is out now.
This feature originally appeared in Jazz UK Issue 73 (January - February 2007)
