Birmingham Conservatoire prizewinner Charlie Bates’s big-band composing is rooted in the late Kenny Wheeler’s discreetly ingenious work, as he reveals on this impressive five-track set, featuring virtuoso trumpeter Percy Pursglove. Jazz’s traditional call-and-response techniques rise to levels of teeming melodic inventiveness here, with the staccato chord-riffing of Cyanopsia met by fast-changing streams of rejoinders, before Pursglove’s two solos segue Wheeler’s trademark top-end squeal and agile freebop phrasing. The smoky woodwind-tinted Almost Gone, the strutting, huffing reeds/brass dialogues of High-Rise and the Sketches-of-Spain-inflected Eyes Shut display Bates’ tonal and melodic assurance. Meanwhile, the 10-minute Eyes Open (the best track) slow-burns an upwardly winding melody, gradually catchy trombone-supported piano hook and a superb Pursglove break of slewing stratospheric and sonorous exclamations. Bates naturally wants to hurl all his newly absorbed knowledge in, and the set could have used a little more patience to let good stories take their time. But that skill can’t be far away.
