Good Evening...Here is the News Music by Django Bates
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Django Bates
Label: Argo
Magazine Review Date: 8/1996
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 65
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 452 099-2ZH
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
(3) English Scenes |
Django Bates, Composer
Diego Masson, Conductor Django Bates, Composer Human Chain London Sinfonietta |
Pond Life |
Django Bates, Composer
Django Bates, Composer Smith Qt |
Tentle Morments |
Django Bates, Composer
Diego Masson, Conductor Django Bates, Composer Human Chain London Sinfonietta |
Travel Cartoons for the Blind |
Django Bates, Composer
Apollo Sax Qt Django Bates, Composer |
Candles still flicker in Romania's dark |
Django Bates, Composer
Diego Masson, Conductor Django Bates, Composer Human Chain London Sinfonietta |
City in Euphoria - World in Chaos |
Django Bates, Composer
Django Bates, Composer Human Chain |
Horses in Rain |
Django Bates, Composer
Diego Masson, Conductor Django Bates, Composer Human Chain London Sinfonietta Sidsel Endresen, Vocalist/voice |
Author: kshadwick
Django Bates has a high profile as a jazz composer, arranger, musician, leader and sideman, and he has been in the public eye for over a decade. His first major impact was achieved with the British collective-cum-big band, Loose Tubes, in the mid-1980s, while the smaller ensemble, Human Chain, is an ongoing project, both live and on record. Bates has a well-developed sense of humour as a composer, as is demonstrated on his jazz-related releases, and much of the music here is invested with his typical eccentricities of manner and technique.
The first work, Three English Scenes, contains a piece carrying the overall title of the album, as well as “Abandoned Railway Station” and “Forms of Escape”. Inasmuch as descriptive titles (along with Bates’s own insert-notes) should never be taken too seriously, these are as subjective and irrelevant as anything Liszt, Tchaikovsky or Dvorak came up with. Bates seems just a little guilty of attempting to direct the listener’s reactions to his music, rather than let the music, or even the titles, resonate. This is explicit in the second group of pieces, for string quartet, calledPond Life. Of the four sections, only one contains just a title, “Deep End”, rather than an explication. It is the only one where Bates is also taking his expressivity seriously.
Perhaps this means that Bates finds it difficult to emerge from his own music and bare his true, unspoken meaning: certainly much of the music here is intent on acting out intricate games and leading the listener by the nose: distracting by bravado techniques and gestures, following the lead of many Western classical composers of this century. With his jazz-based work it is often easier to achieve success with this method due to the larger expressive vocabulary available to him – individualist soloists, unique timbres and vocalizations of instruments, and considerably more rhythmic dexterity and excitement. Bates approaches this problem most closely in Tentle Moments, where he uses rhythmic displacement and contrasts, as well as large dynamic shifts, to generate tension and release, and a sense of delicious danger. Yet it still sounds studied in its simulated chaos and freedom. Bates is still having the musicians playing at it, rather than playing it.
The Apollo Saxophone Quartet perform superbly and have great fun in the knockabout Travel Cartoons for the Blind, and Bates writes convincingly for these sonorities, but then this seems to lie as much at the root of the problem with this disc as at its strengths. Bates is prodigiously gifted and can write effectively for any instrumental combination, but often the music carries only a modicum of meaning because, unlike jazz groups, classical ensembles are not paid to bring their own personal baggage to the music they play. One of the most successful interpretations of a Bates piece outside jazz’s modern mainstream is on Sidsel Endresen’s ECM album, “Exile”, where she sings a stark but complex Bates song,Stages I, II, III and brings a blinding, understated intensity to it which makes his own piano backing doubly effective. She does the same here on Horses in Rain, and it makes me wonder what Bates could achieve if he abandoned Ives and the grapeshot tradition of eclecticism (which embraces Zappa as well) which seems to have smothered the meaning rather too successfully here.'
The first work, Three English Scenes, contains a piece carrying the overall title of the album, as well as “Abandoned Railway Station” and “Forms of Escape”. Inasmuch as descriptive titles (along with Bates’s own insert-notes) should never be taken too seriously, these are as subjective and irrelevant as anything Liszt, Tchaikovsky or Dvorak came up with. Bates seems just a little guilty of attempting to direct the listener’s reactions to his music, rather than let the music, or even the titles, resonate. This is explicit in the second group of pieces, for string quartet, called
Perhaps this means that Bates finds it difficult to emerge from his own music and bare his true, unspoken meaning: certainly much of the music here is intent on acting out intricate games and leading the listener by the nose: distracting by bravado techniques and gestures, following the lead of many Western classical composers of this century. With his jazz-based work it is often easier to achieve success with this method due to the larger expressive vocabulary available to him – individualist soloists, unique timbres and vocalizations of instruments, and considerably more rhythmic dexterity and excitement. Bates approaches this problem most closely in Tentle Moments, where he uses rhythmic displacement and contrasts, as well as large dynamic shifts, to generate tension and release, and a sense of delicious danger. Yet it still sounds studied in its simulated chaos and freedom. Bates is still having the musicians playing at it, rather than playing it.
The Apollo Saxophone Quartet perform superbly and have great fun in the knockabout Travel Cartoons for the Blind, and Bates writes convincingly for these sonorities, but then this seems to lie as much at the root of the problem with this disc as at its strengths. Bates is prodigiously gifted and can write effectively for any instrumental combination, but often the music carries only a modicum of meaning because, unlike jazz groups, classical ensembles are not paid to bring their own personal baggage to the music they play. One of the most successful interpretations of a Bates piece outside jazz’s modern mainstream is on Sidsel Endresen’s ECM album, “Exile”, where she sings a stark but complex Bates song,
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