Jazz Articles about Django Bates

About Django Bates

Album Review

Anouar Brahem: After the Last Sky

Read "After the Last Sky" reviewed by Scott Gudell

by Scott Gudell
September 23, 2025

Although ECM Records has released straight-ahead jazz, free form and more, many of their recordings sweep over listeners with mysterious, ethereal and hypnotic sounds creating alluring siren calls. When those sessions are taking place with an ECM release on the horizon, it is easy to imagine the artists are thinking about 'where's the mystery?'--which is what Anouar Brahem seemed to focus on this time around. Brahem, a revered Tunisian-born master of the oud (the fretless stringed instrument with ...

Album Review

Anouar Brahem: After the Last Sky

Read "After the Last Sky" reviewed by Mario Calvitti

by Mario Calvitti
May 19, 2025

Fin dal suo esordio la musica del suonatore di oud tunisino Anouar Brahem ha oscillato tra i tre poli della musica tradizionale classica araba, l'improvvisazione jazzistica e la musica classica europea di stampo cameristico, generalmente adattando le quantità di ogni singolo componente ai musicisti scelti per interpretarla. Dopo i primi due album nei quali aveva proposto essenzialmente la propria versione della musica classica araba, accompagnato da musicisti e strumenti di quella tradizione, Brahem si è via via spostato ...

Liner Notes

Bill Bruford: The Summerfold Collection 1987-2008

by John Kelman
September 2, 2023

Intrepid percussionist/composer/bandleader Bill Bruford began his career in the late '60s art-rock arena with Yes and, later, King Crimson, but jazz has always moved underneath, like an eddying current. His early recordings, well documented on the companion Winterfold Collection, may not speak the language of jazz, but they possess its spirit. By 1986, Bruford was looking for a new path. Crimson had again dissolved, the 1981-'84 incarnation having provided him with the opportunity to explore nascent electronic drum ...

Album Review

Django Bates: Tenacity

Read "Tenacity" reviewed by Pat Youngspiel

by Pat Youngspiel
November 20, 2020

Few jazz artists go to such great lengths to make their audience feel at the same time bewildered by humor-infused technical exhaustion and smitten by charm and sheer musical beauty as Django Bates does. The English pianist and composer has gained a reputation over the years, for bringing the quirkiest and widest range of ideas and styles to a, more or less, aesthetically-serious art form. Some might even claim he's the Frank Zappa of jazz. Then again, who's to say ...

Radio & Podcasts

A Night at the Jazz Circus! - Part 1

by Ludovico Granvassu
November 10, 2020

Circus is like Jazz. They both require a great deal of originality and a capacity to improvise and be in the moment. They come out of a sense of urgency and self-expression since artists do not embrace them to get rich. And they both demand incredible dedication and discipline. This week we explore the connections between these two performative art forms, focusing on jazz inspired by the circus world, composed for circus shows, or evoking—in a way or ...

Album Review

Django Bates: Tenacity

by John Kelman
October 9, 2020

It's been a long time since that late May, 2013 week in Luleå, Sweden, where pianist Django Bates and his Belovèd Trio first collaborated with the renowned Norrbotten Big Band. Fully documented in the All About Jazz article Django Bates: From Zero to Sixty in Five Days, Bates, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun, along with other non-Norrbotteners, including guitarist Markus Pesonen, tubaist Daniel Herskedal and trombonist/vocalist Ashley Slater, made the lengthy trek to this small coastal town, located ...

Lyrics

Django Bates: 60+40—Charlie Parker: 100

by Vic Albani
September 7, 2020

Nel nefasto 2020 molte celebrazioni, anniversari e festival a tema hanno dovuto arrendersi all'emergenza Covid-19 anche se, in calendario, ne sono rimasti alcuni davvero irrinunciabili. Uno di questi è il centenario della nascita del signor Charlie Parker, nato a Kansas City il 29 agosto 1920 e scomparso poi a New York nella primavera del 1955. Ad uno dei nomi “must" del jazz di tutti i tempi sono dedicati nel corso dell'anno decine e decine di omaggi, ricordi, commemorazioni, festival interi ...