Chris Batchelor's Zoetic: Telling The Tale

A founder member of the radical London big band Loose Tubes in 1983, trumpeter Chris Batchelor was one of the Young Turks leading the mid-to-late 1980s British jazz renaissance. While pianist and composer Django Bates emerged as perhaps the most high-profile member of the band, Batchelor is every inch his equal, both as a player and as a composer.

Batchelor leads two groups in 2023. One is the Dada-esque romp Pigfoot, a quartet he founded in 2013 with pianist Liam Noble, tubaist Oren Marshall and drummer Paul Clarvis; Marshall has since been replaced by baritone saxophonist James Allsopp. The band began life playing what Batchelor described as "21st Century Acid Trad," but subsequently broadened its remit to include jazzadelic transformations of Motown, Led Zeppelin, Burt Bacharach and much more. In the 1980s, Batchelor was a member of the faux Balkan band 3 Mustaphas 3, whose motto was: "Forward in all directions." The same 360-degree trajectory applies to Pigfoot.

Zoetic is a more sober affair, but an equally elevated and enjoyable one. It is a quintet. Guitarist John Parricelli and bassist Steve Watts were once Batchelor's colleagues in Loose Tubes; Clarvis, on hand drums and percussion, comes along from Pigfoot; and violist Margrit Hasler is probably best known in jazz circles as a member of another onetime Loose Tuber, tenor saxophonist Mark Lockheart's Ellington In Anticipation ensemble.

Telling The Tale is Zoetic's debut album. Its global influences are as wide as Pigfoot's, but the treatment, though still vibrant, is less frenetic, more nuanced.. All but one of the tunes—"Canto Triste" by Edu Lobo and Vinicius de Moraes—are Batchelor originals, and the video below of the band playing the title track is worth a thousand descriptive words. (YouTube identifies the item as from five years ago, but Telling The Tale was recorded in 2022.) As always with Batchelor, around half the pleasure comes from the compositions and the other half from the performances, which, as might be expected from a lineup of this calibre, are terrific. It is still early days, but Telling The Tale is a surefire contender for 2023's best albums lists.