Django Bates - Beloved Bird ****

If jazz is the music of surprise, then few deliver the gift of astonishment more readily than Mr Bates. After the high energy, multifaceted shenanigans of the splendid Stormchaser comes this unexpected, but not unexpectedly dazzling, piano trio. Bates as Bud Powell is not an obvious analogy, but anyone expecting bop tributes can stop right here. The purists, as ever, may find Bates’ reimaginings too superficially quirky for their liking: yet Bird’s spirit is here, Bird the iconoclast who wanted to learn from Varèse, Bird the revolutionary who embraced Latin rhythms as well as bop’s sprung tempos, who nestled as happily against Mitch Miller’s oboe as he did Max Roach’s rhythms. And Bird the composer in the moment is here too as Bates slices up these familiar songs, dividing and ever sub-dividing, giving us not improvisations over a theme, but a re-composing, little epics in a (half) bar. It’s fascinating to compare Bates’ treatment to Gilad Atzmon’s In Loving Memory Of America: it’s a tribute to Bird’s genius that such extraordinarily different albums could spring from the Parker well-head. It doesn’t always work; a manic ‘Now’s The Time’ palls, and the drums and bass could’ve been more to the fore, but a straightahead ‘Laura’ enchants (like Atzmon, even Bates can’t meddle with the sentiment) while the long meditation around ‘Ah Leu Cha’ is as spacy and meditative as the opening ‘Scrapple From The Apple’ is intense, allusive and joyous. Bird Lives indeed. Andy Robson