Django Bates - The Loneliness Of Being Right
Thursday, June 26, 2008
There’s no one quite like Django Bates. Once the enfant terrible of the 1980s jazz scene, the focal point of Loose Tubes, the ramshackle and influential big band that became a launching pad for a host of significant jazz musicians, Django’s solo career as a keyboardist and composer has developed in fits and starts since. He has gained devotion, bafflement and international recognition in equal measure, as his inexorable retreat from the surburbia of his youth towards a global hybrid of jazz, influenced by Frank Zappa, Monty Python, Joe Zawinul and English pastoralism, rockets into its own, slightly elliptical, orbit.
Now a professor of music in Copenhagen, Django has put together a bohemian big band called StoRMChaser which releases its debut album this month that blows the dust off any cosy notions of the big band once and for all. Andy Robson enters the crazy world of Django Bates.
Lost your marbles? Then Django Bates is your man. He lives, sometimes at least, at The Lost Marble Department. We know because there’s a brass plaque on his door that says so. Of course, you wouldn’t expect Bates to live anywhere else. Over the years, some critics have suggested that Bates’ marbles have been lost all too frequently. He’s somehow succeeded at leading the vanguard of the Brit-jazz scene while remaining fabulously ambivalent towards it. He’s continued to create music that has charm and certain child-like qualities, much like that school-ground game of lost youth. Yet this is also music so brimful of massed themes, multiple voices and super-eclectic influences that the less charitable might suggest that it’s music where the boundaries between genius and madness are all too indeterminate.
Bates’ east London home, then, might be the place where he reclaims those lost round and bouncy things. “Well, that was the idea,” Bates says, giving his response all the weight and seriousness he gives to everything, whether the question is about how to achieve world peace, what makes Bach beautiful or indeed, where to stuff his marbles.
“I wanted somewhere where people could send any marbles that they’d found. They’d be logged and stored here, and then if someone had lost a marble they could check with us to see whether we had
it or not.”
Eminently sensible. As you’d expect from a professor. For Django has been a prof at the prestigious Rhythmic Music Conservatory of Copenhagen in Denmark, for a good couple of years now. Once upon a time, when the Danes were Vikings, they came to our shores to rape and pillage. Now, as cruelly, they rip from our midst our more talented and creative spirits by using such terrifying weapons of mass seduction as offers of a regular income, weekly gigs, academic respectability and recognition for hard work and tenacity, which were all elements decidedly missing from Bates’ professional life until the Danes came knocking in 2005.
He was, until then, as ever, the prophet more appreciated abroad than in his own country. Despite 25 years as a working pro that had won him international respect throughout the USA, Scandinavia and Europe, Bates was still struggling to find gigs in London and the UK, especially for major but costly big band projects which in the past had included Loose Tubes and Delightful Precipice. Bates is not one to be bitter. “It’s tempting to be negative, but you have to be optimistic”, he says. But nonetheless Django despaired at the “scary” Brit jazz scene before his move to Copenhagen. “There had been the demise of the old Vortex and there was a feeling in the jazz world that what was left was crumbling and falling away.” He did an interview at the time, bewailing the lack of opportunity in the UK, but, looking back, he now smiles and talks about his leaving note.
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #121 to read the full feature and receive a Free CD Subscribe Here...