Django Bates Nominated For New Music Award
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Composer and keyboards player Django Bates has made the shortlist for the prestigious PRS Foundation-backed New Music Award for a work that he will create called ‘Pedal Tones’. Currently a professor at the Rhythmic conservatory in Copenhagen, Bates only occasionally performs in England, most recently at last November’s London Jazz Festival tribute concert to the late Joe Zawinul, a key influence on Bates’ compositional and musical choices.
The award, worth £50,000 to the winner which the organisers claim is the most financially significant award for music in the UK, was on its launch four years ago awarded to ex-Pogues musician Jem Finer who is one of the judges for the award this year. Other judges include Marcus Davey, Jenny Abramsky, Eric Nicoli, Nitin Sawhney and Errollyn Wallen. The key thing about the New Music award is that the work has not been performed in public before. The winner has less than six months to create the proposed work and perform it in public.
An arch deconstructionist with a Monty Python-esque rooted playful sense of the banal, partly identifying it with a certain social malaise, Bates was heavily influenced by kwela as well as Joe Zawinul but he is best known for Loose Tubes in the 1980s, small group Human Chain and his big band Delightful Precipice. He has been a singular presence on the UK jazz scene for more than two decades and has proved highly influential for a generation of his peers who include saxophonist Iain Ballamy and drummer Martin France as well as later European larger ensembles who frequently perform his charts.
The proposal for ‘Pedal Tones’ would involve a year-long, UK wide performance of a new work for pedal bicycle and four ratchet music boxes with a pedal bicycle to be adapted by designer Ben Wilson, so that the turning of its pedals operates four simple ratchet synchronised music boxes that would individually trigger one voice of a four-part contrapuntal composition by Bates. He has a battle on his hands to win the award, as the list also contains Robert Jarvis for ‘Echolocation’, Eliza Carthy, David Thomas and Adam Bushell for ‘Carousel Organ’, Shlomo and Anna Meredith for ‘Concerto for Beatboxer and Orchestra’, John Matthias, Nick Ryan and Jane Grant for ‘The Fragmented Orchestra and Netsayi Chigwendere for ‘Adjustments’.