The final piece on this album ‘It Began To Get Dark’ is, whether intentionally or not, something of a leitmotiv for the whole set. For the most part the music is on the shadowy, edgy, moody side and owes an obvious debt to that crucial point in the early 1970s where modes, funky electric colours and terse, tight phrasing captured the imagination of the leading lights in jazz. With that in mind Miles Davis circa Bitches Brew is an obvious reference but Bates’ palette is dotted as much with splashes of Herbie, Eddie Henderson and Benny Maupin, and the spacious, often enigmatic atmospheres created on the bulk of this set are not unappealing. Three tunes are penned by Samuel Blaser who is currently in a rich vein of form, as can be heard on his own A Mirror To Machaut album (reviewed below), so it is little surprise that the music has substance. Regardless of these plus points, One From None still feels like the work of a bandleader-composer who can go to the next level creatively if he injects some more lateral thinking into his work. Whether the elements need to come from inside or outside the field of improvised music is a moot point, but Bates surely knows that Herbie’s ‘Sly’ was not a laudatory reference to either Prez, Trane, Duke, Diz or Bird.