PETER BRUUN  

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THE GARDIAN 2010

If any anti-jazz fundamentalists had decided to bomb an area within a half-mile radius of Dalston Junction on Tuesday night, they would have despatched some of the music's oldest and newest legends, and a fair slice of its London audience. British pianist Django Bates – with so much improvisation now pouring from him that his impetuous fluency is startling even his longest-serving fans – played a Vortex rammed to the doors. A quick trip across the road would have found the late Sun Ra's Arkestra, playing in a Cafe Oto so packed the only places to dance were on the chairs.

Bates, accompanied by Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and Danish drummer Peter Bruun, was playing the music from his new Charlie Parker-dedicated Beloved Bird album – a mix of rhythm-bending rearrangements, original material, and solo and group improv brimming with fresh ideas. The gig was even better for being able to witness the pouncing creative alertness and empathy of Eldh and Bruun at close range.

Parker's Moose the Mooche theme began as a rumble at the piano's bottom end, and hovered insinuatingly there before the uptempo floodgates opened. A slowly swooping chordal melody turned into a freebop Billie's Bounce, and percussive chords and loose improvising around a bass-anchored tonal centre became a fitfully salsa-grooving My Little Suede Shoes. In the second half, Star Eyes receded slowly into a dreamscape, the usually brisk Ah-leu-cha was an enraptured trickle of notes against slurred bass sounds and cymbal-edge tickles, and – as he had at the start – the pianist opened an eventually flying Now's the Time as a smouldering, lurching, low-end growl. Bates now has one of jazz's great piano trios on his hands. His restless questing after new experiences probably won't keep it there for long.

 

THE GARDIAN 2010

For his 40th birthday, in 2000, Django Bates made an American songbook album. It was an unusual choice for the pianist and composer, but he didn't flinch from twisting the familiar patterns and dynamics of those evergreens out of shape. For his 50th, he's applied the same treatment to the 1940s bebop themes composed by or linked with his childhood hero, Charlie Parker. Dazzling themes such as Hot House, Now's the Time and Moose the Mooche are reworked in a regular acoustic piano-trio setting, with Danish musicians Petter Eldh on bass and Peter Bruun on drums (the group tour the UK next month). As a balance of creative interpretation and insight into the tumultuous psyche that created this music, it's an astonishing achievement. A ducking-and-diving, tempo-shuffling Scrapple from the Apple, an updated-Latin My Little Suede Shoes, and an almost-straight Now's the Time played at breakneck speed are highlights – and for all Bates's radical makeovers, his enthusiasm for traditional bop piano blazes through. A trickling, impressionistic, rather classical exploration of the normally uptempo Ah-leu-cha conjures a search for privacy and peace on Bird's part that his background, lifestyle and economic circumstances never allowed him.

 

THE GARDIAN 2011

There's been a bit of a misunderstanding," pianist Django Bates brightly announced. "We thought we were guests of Evan's, and he thought he was a guest of ours." Contemporary-sax trailblazer Evan Parker had been invited to curate a five-night Vortex season for musicians he likes (from Oxford keyboard firebrand Alexander Hawkins to the tireless octogenerarian Stan Tracey) but a liaison with Bates's remarkable Beloved Bird trio was bound to be one of the most tempting prospects of the run.

Bates's trio with bass-and-drums partnership Petter Eldh and Peter Bruun delivered one of the great jazz albums of 2010 with its Charlie Parker interpretations on Beloved Bird. The "misunderstanding" was down to Parker's modest conviction that the crowd ought to hear those visionary rearrangements unimpeded. In the event, they made a compellingly varied show together. Tentative opening moments quickly turned to a maelstrom, with Parker's tenor sax delivering gruff eddies of sound and exclamations over Bates's runs and the agile pulse of Eldh and Bruun. The alertness with which the two jazz stars adapted their phrasing to each other was astonishing, and extended to abstract reinvention of the jazz ballad, too.

In the second set, the saxophonist sat at the side of the stage for a while, smiling at the tempo juggles, headlong bebop and hard-packed theme statements of Charlie Parker's Scrapple from the Apple and Moose the Mooche, some of the most inventive reappraisals of his work ever conceived. Parker resisted Bates's invitation to join a jaunt through Hot House, but when Bates swapped piano for tenor horn, the two set off on an exuberant dialogue that was nearly straightahead swing.

 

ALL ABOUT JAZZ 2011

Django Bates claims that he heard Charlie Parker records on the day he was born. Fifty years later, Bates has formed Belovèd, giving life to his longstanding love for Parker's music on his trio's debut, Belovèd Bird. It's an album that ably demonstrates how love means never having to play in the same old way, for this sparklingly inventive album is not a retread of old Parker arrangements, but a reappraisal of the sound—a reconstruction based on Bates' strongly-held belief that Parker was a musician who was always willing to evolve. 

Bates has been one of the UK's most respected jazz musicians for over 20 years: a member of Loose Tubes, leader of Delightful Precipice and, since 2005, a Professor at the Copenhagen Rhythmic Music Conservatory. It was in 2005 that he was asked to join in a celebration of Parker at the Copenhagen Jazz House: eventually, five years later, the arrangements he produced for that celebration form the basis for Belovèd Bird. 

Belovèd's Danish rhythm section, of bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun, is crucial to the sound of the album. Indeed, it's their playing—strong, tight, empathetic but definitely-not-bebop—that most consistently separates Belovèd's sound from Parker's. Eldh's playing has swagger and swing, as Bruun skips and bounces across the kit. It's a great double act, a partnership exemplified by their work on "My Blue Suede Shoes." Bates plays a jagged but readily identifiable version of the melody, but Eldh and Bruun put together a slinky and seductive rhythm that genuinely recreates the tune's mood. 

It's Bates, though, who is in charge. His playing is full of creativity, joy and respect for the tunes whether he's playing in a recognizably bebop style or extending and exploring the music's potential for reinvention. 

Belovèd's playfulness comes across strongly on Parker's "Chi Chi." The tune opens in a distinctly free form style, then Bates picks out a more recognizable bar or two of the song's melody before Eldh takes on the lead role for another few bars. After that Eldh and Bates trade lines while Bruun dives in with some of his most bop-ish drumming. 

Two short band compositions, the light and pretty ,"Punctuat-i'on" and the rather mysterious "Plasticity," punctuate the lineup of bop classics. To close, the trio stretches out Parker's light and upbeat "Ah Leu Cha" to almost 20 minutes, turning it into a languid, dream-like, meditative thing of beauty. 

Belovèd Bird was recorded at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory and it sounds great. The album's packaging is striking and Bates' liner notes are a joy to read. Is this the direction Parker's evolution might have taken him on had he lived to a ripe old age? Perhaps not; but Belovèd's direction is a fascinating and beautiful one. Bird would be proud.

 

 

BBC 2012

The story goes that, as a boy growing up in south London, pianist Django Bates would wander the streets whistling Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker tunes, hoping to attract like-minded individuals. This cute piece of mythmaking signals two important facets of Bates’ personality: a wilful eccentricity and an abiding love of Parker’s work.

It was these two traits that came into combined focus on Bates’ 2010 album, Beloved Bird. A trio date recorded with Danish musicians, drummer Peter Bruun and bassist Petter Eldh, it put a selection of Parker’s bebop classics through the wringer of Bates’ quixotic imagination: deconstructed, shuffled, and reassembled as impishly skewed versions.

For Confirmation, Bates has reconvened the trio to tackle more Bird numbers but also, this time, half a dozen originals. It says something of the completeness of Bates’ aesthetic that, without looking at the sleeve notes, it’s not always easy to tell the two apart. The title track (a Parker tune) tumbles straight into a dizzying mix of mercurial flourishes, wonky runs, declamatory stabs and sudden flashes up the keys, all jammed together in a darting, disorientating merry-go-round; while Dimple (an original) is built around an exuberantly up-tempo and swingingly old-fashioned joie de vivre. At every step, Bates seems intent on cheerfully wrong-footing even the most attentive listener.

The rhythm section of Bruun and Eldh does a staggering job of matching and anticipating Bates’ synaptic-fast soliloquies. On tracks like Parker’s Donna Lee and Bates’ We Are Not Lost, We Are Simply Finding Our Way, the trio locks into a stumbling lurch that feels like a sailor returning to ship after a night’s shore-leave, but nonetheless hangs together with a rolling momentum and a maddening logic that highlights the sharply crafted accuracy underpinning the madcap approach. Moreover, the trio brings Bates’ vision to life with such an intuitive group-mind that it’s nearly impossible to tell where the writing ends and group improvisation begins.

Ask anyone making jazz today and they’ll probably tell you that that effortless synergy of composition and extemporisation is the very essence of the music. For Django Bates Belovèd it feels as natural as asking a bird to fly.

 

ALL ABOUT JAZZ 2012

In the jazz world, groups often convene for special projects, though, more often than not, the participants then usually go their separate ways, even if the underlying concept- -or, even, just the band's chemistry—suggests further continuance. When Django Bates put together Belovèd Bird (Lost Marble, 2010), it seemed likely that the maverick British pianist, composer and foundation shaker's off-the-wall tribute to bebop progenitor/saxophonist Charlie Parker would be a one-off. Now, two years later, Confirmation finds the same trio back with an album that, recorded in November 2011, is hitting the streets more quickly than its predecessor, which took nearly 30 months to see the light of day.

Rapid delivery isn't the only difference. While Bates contributed a couple of compositions to Belovèd Bird, they were but brief miniatures, acting more as connecting threads between a set that deconstructed, reconstructed, fragmented and otherwise twisted and turned tunes written by or associated with Parker. Here, shifting the direct focus largely away from Parker, Confirmation's ten tracks (and one not-so-hidden bonus) come largely from Bates' pen, although the trio still finds plenty of grist in Parker's writing, delivering barely recognizable—but, most importantly, still recognizable—interpretations of three of his compositions.

"Confirmation" is played with reckless abandon—or, it seems so, but with bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun turning the time inside out, altering tempo alongside Bates like a car running out of gas, hiccupping, speeding up and slowing down—there may be more planning than meets the ear. Bates approaches "Donna Lee" like a man possessed, shifting from blinding two-handed octave lines to light-speed single-note phrases that could only be achieved with all ten fingers working together in concert, suggesting snippets of a familiar theme even if never quite collecting them all together. "Now's the Time" is more immediately recognizable, despite a quick dissolve into darker territory, with time and changes gradually reasserting themselves, though the tune—like all the Parker covers—never actually settles into anything resembling swing.

Elsewhere, Bates' compositions continue the free-spirited fun. "We Are Not Lost, We Are Simply Finding Our Way," is aptly titled, as the trio, once again, plays with tempo, seeming to start, stop, and move in and out of time in ways that suggests greater preplanning amongst the free play. And that's the beauty of Confirmation; even when singer Ashley Slater guests on Burt Bacharach and Hal

David's "A House is Not a Home," with its clear changes and (moderately) consistent tempo, it's still redolent of Bates' innate idiosyncrasies. Even more, despite Confirmation largely mirroring Belovèd Bird's all-acoustic nature, the ethereal sonic washes in the weeds of the song signal Bates' greater injection of electronics into the 90-second bonus track—a de facto coda, with synthesizer lines bubbling beneath Slater's repeated mantra ("good night") and the album's most consistent pulse—suggesting a possible directional shift for Belovèd that will only be, well, confirmed if and when Bates decides to reconvene this quirky, curious and strangely appealing trio for a third round. Here's hoping.

 

LONDON JAZZNEWS 2012

‘Joyful, insouciant and insanely clever’ are the adjectives chosen by liner-note writer Evan Parker to describe the way pianist Django Bates has ‘reconsidered, fragmented and thoroughly “Djangoised”’ the melodies and harmonies on Confirmation. 

The last verb is probably the most significant: success in jazz is widely thought to depend on finding an individual voice, and the use of a musician’s name as shorthand meaningfully encapsulating a particular approach is thus the highest form of compliment that can be paid to a practitioner. 

And, as anyone who’s heard Bates’s trio’s previous release, dedicated to Charlie Parker tunes, will attest, the UK pianist is something of an expert in the art of what Parker (Evan) refers to as a determination to ‘deconstruct and reconstruct’ the great altoist’s lines. Here, the trio – completed by Petter Eldh (bass) and Peter Bruun (drums) – addresses Charlie Parker material (‘Donna Lee’, and ‘Now’s the Time’ in addition to the title-track) with the same mix of intensity and adventurousness that made the album’s predecessor so compelling; it also plays six Bates originals (with typically quirky titles such as ‘Senza Bitterness’ and ‘We are Not Lost, We are Simply Finding Our Way’) with all the spiky, nervy but somehow utterly appropriate verve and wit that their originality and eccentricity demand.

 

THE PROMS 2013

Prom 62: Django Bates: A Celebration of Charlie Parker. 

(BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, 28th August. Review by Alyn Shipton)

On the surface, this concert had about as much to do with Charlie Parker as Ross Russell’s idealised and highly inaccurate book about the saxophonist, which was Django Bates’ teenage inspiration for first exploring Parker’s music. There were snatches of Parker themes, and some repertoire associated with his recordings, but little connection to the blues that lay at the heart of his every note, and seldom any direct representation of the saxophonist’s free-ranging improvisational playing. 

That said, as with most of Django Bates’s music, deeper currents were swirling through the evening than the surface eddies and whirlpools of the collaboration between his trio Belovèd and the Norrbotten Big Band. The way in which Bates has teased Parker’s body of work into new life in a piano trio setting over the last few years has been highly intriguing. It has been marvellous to witness Belovèd ’s collective growth from concert to concert and from first to second album. The spirited interaction between his increasingly virtuosic piano and the playing of bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun is the link to Parker’s extemporary genius. Whereas Parker mainly experimented with fast flowing melodic lines that delved nonchalantly into passing and unusual chords, playing across, inside and outside the four-square rhythms of his time, Bates’s experiments plot such ideas on a broader canvas, with far more rhythmic flexibility and a less metronomic concept of time. 

Sensibly, the trio — with its well-developed intuitive interplay —remained the core of the concert, and particularly in the early part of the evening the textures and tones brought in by the Norrbotten players often remained just that. As the piano, bass and drums delved deeply into David Raksin’s melody “Laura”, the big band’s sustained notes and occasional choppy phrases complemented the trio’s playing, with Finnish guitarist Markus Pesonen adding scratches and crunches to the tonal palette. As they moved on to the next, more uptempo segment of the concert, Bates really went for it as a soloist, somehow managing to be energetic and outgoing, yet introspective at the same time, and his big band writing, with densely textured reeds and punchy brass interjections, was thrilling.

The UK premiere of Bates’s own “The Study of Touch” (originally inspired not so much by Parker as the Incredible String Band) was, ironically the piece that Parker himself might have recognised as closest to his own work with large jazz orchestras. Emerging from a simple five-note left hand piano motif, passages from reeds and brass gradually coalesced into a powerful whole. Both the soprano saxophonist Håken Broström and tenorist Karl-Martin Almqvist then took lengthy solos, the former punching his way over the ensemble, the latter interacting more closely with his reed section colleagues. 

Bacharach’s “A House Is Not a Home, with Ashley Slater as vocalist led to a momentary draining of momentum, but the concert took flight again with a rousing “My Little Suede Shoes”. As with many of Bates’s reworkings of well-known melodies, the tune popped out slightly unexpectedly over a rhythmic backdrop that was floating rather than firmly anchored, and the band — trio and section players working as one — then swaggered into its stride, before Bates jumped down off the stage to dance among the standing Promenaders.

 

The best was saved until last: a dense, thorough and affectionate interpretation of “Star Eyes”. Overall, the expansion of the trio’s repertoire to encompass Europe’s most Northerly professional big band was a great success, with some striking and interesting writing from Bates. Parker, on the eve of what would have been his 83rd birthday, and wearing the hat that loved musical innovation and adventure, would no doubt have loved it.

 

THE GARDIAN 2013

The acoustics at Kings Place balance the smallest sound somewhere between a soft sheen and needle sharpness, and they gave the repertoire of originals and Charlie Parker themes pianist Django Bates and his trio have been developing since 2010 a fascinatingly fresh character. The differences were magnified by Bates's new use of a pitch-bending synth alongside the acoustic piano, so he frequently played simultaneous lines in eerie almost-unison with each other. Bates, Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and Danish drummer Peter Bruun may be reappraising this music more enthusiastically than usual as they approach their 28 August Prom concert – on which the leader's audacious, moving and frequently witty originals and the trio's gamechanging Charlie Parker remakes will get the full jazz-orchestra treatment in the company of Sweden's much-admired Norrbotten Big Band.

 

 

Bates began with his own poignant ballad Sadness All the Way Down, edited to short treble trickles and quietly wincing synth distortions against Bruun's cymbal flickers – ending in suddenly plunging chords, a dead stop, and then an alternately swinging and cogitating version of Charlie Parker's Scrapple from the Apple. The pianist suggested a dissonant Bill Evans on his own Peonies As Promised, and embarked on an improvisation on My Little Suede Shoes that was both full-on and fluently delicate, as Bates enlisted the acoustics to noticeably lighten his touch. Parker's Star Eyes took on an almost sinister character in the dark collective hum of its middle section, and it faded on Eldh's spooky repetition of the melody at the top of the bass's register, over a buzzing-bee background drone. The second half upped the intensity a notch or so – marked by Bates's beautiful slow transformation of Parker's A-Leu-Cha (he turns it into something close to a Christmas carol), a sustained free-swing examination of the uptempo Confirmation, and a bouncy encore version of Now's the Time, in which the famous theme seemed to lurk without fully declaring itself throughout the solos.

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FINANISIAL TIMES (2017)

Django Bates’ Belovèd The Study of Touch (ECM) The Belovèd piano trio has given Django Bates’ vivid musical imagination an added focus and internal discipline that the pyrotechnics of his orchestral projects sometimes lack. The dramatic juxtapositions and intriguing twists remain, but now they unfold organically from within, driven by a tight-knit interplay that sustains mood and gives the music more room to breathe. The trio formed as a free-improvising workshop in 2005 when Bates was teaching at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Academy — he heard bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun informally rehearsing and joined in. The band burst into recorded life five years later when they channelled their collective discipline into a vivid reimagining of the Charlie Parker songbook, released as Belovèd Bird. This release highlights Bates’ intimate grasp of grand piano textures and the intuitive bond between piano, bass and drums and has a more introspective air. Five tracks rework original material first featured on the 2012 album Confirmation, there is a succinct time-bending cover of Parker’s “Passport” and Iain Bellamy’s delicate “This World” is a sustained moodpiece. The album opens with the downward melodic slope of the fugue-like “Sadness All the Way Down” and closes with the upward rumble and light-touch frolics of “Happiness all the way Up”. The longest track, “The Study of Touch”, journeys eloquently from impressionist balladry and bucolic reverie to florid harmonic development and counterpoint swing. Bates leads gently from within, merging with the delicate chemistry between Eldh’s lines and Bruun’s swishes and taps while displaying a compositional grasp of form. Elsewhere, Bates’ abrasive surrealism surfaces on the revisited “We Are Not Lost, We Are Simply Finding Our Way” and is off the leash on the unfolding emotional saga of “Peonies as Promised”. New composition “Slippage Street” rides out on the urgent rhythms of urban funk; “Little Petheridge” on the shifting colours of a classical cadence.

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​https://www.ft.com/content/649845dc-cd93-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6

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STUDY OF TOUCH (ECM 2017)

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Those familiar with the music of Django Bates will probably already possess this gem of a recording and therefore not be reading this.. so a bit of background.. through the 1980s-early '90s collaborative big band Loose Tubes, its morph, Delightful Precipice and his smaller group, Human Chain, Django has long been a mainstay of the European contemporary jazz scene. On this first ECM outing as leader (he has previously graced the recordings of Sidsel Endresen, Ken Stubbs' 'First House' and more recently, Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem) he is joined by his regular Belovèd colleagues, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun to rework some old trio material (the tunes feel much more 'lived-in') and some even older, achingly beautiful compositions like 'Little Petherick' (recorded on his 1993 'Delightful Precipice' album Summer Fruits (And Unrest)) and saxophonist Iain Ballamy's 'This World' (recorded on his 1995 release 'All Men Amen' with Django at the piano). There are new tunes too and the record wouldn't be complete without a rollicking take on Charlie Parker's 'Passport' (Bird's tunes being the reason behind the trio's first recording and a compositional mainstay of performances ever since). This recording will not just appeal to lovers of the piano trio format as these musicians take the concept way beyond the 'tradition'.. rhythmically intense and telepathically nuanced, melody is never far from the fingers.. think Keith Jarrett's 1970's Belonging band recording 'My Song' for a comparable mix of aural delights. Owner and producer Manfred Eicher may just have found the 'perfect' ECM piano trio with Belovèd.. beautifully recorded at the iconic Rainbow Studio in Oslo.. A must buy!

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-this was my quick copy paste from searching the internet my self

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