Django Bates doesn’t play other people’s music often, but when he does, resemblances to the originals can be opaque. The unruly fiftysomething jazz composer has battered New York, New York into a free-jazz thrash, for instance, and interpreted Billie Holiday’s classic Solitude on a pub piano with two spoons and a bunch of keys hanging under the lid. But remaking the quixotic 1967 Beatles classic Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has turned him almost respectful, to judge by his Saluting Sgt Pepper album, and the first of 12 shows he and a crack German band are performing at Ronnie Scott’s this week.
Bates’ Sgt Pepper tribute with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band features skilful Copenhagen vocal trio Eggs Laid By Tigers closely mimicking Beatles’ harmonies, even if terse saxophone improv and huffing trombones constantly swoop and squall around them. A tough score and a short rehearsal made the band tentative at first, and balancing the creative tension between the faithfulness of the vocals and the typical dissonances of Bates’ harmonies was elusive early on. Perhaps mindful of the late show to come, the leader also pushed quickly through the opening songs when the band might usefully have been able to stretch out more – but the groove settled down and lead vocalist Martin Ullits Dahl grew in confidence on a vivid account of Fixing a Hole, pursued by seesawing sax and brass hooks and Stuart Hall’s penetrating guitar lines.
Dahl and the backing singers coaxed an evocative warmth from She’s Leaving Home, and the versatile Hall’s microtonal sound on violin, the disembodied sonorities of the vocals over a tabla throb and a squirming postbop soprano sax break brought a powerful reimagining of the ethereal Within You Without You. Bates set a New Orleans trad-jam loose around When I’m 64, and an exhilaratingly hard-rocking band riff took off under Lovely Rita – letting an extended rhythm-stretching vamp run free in a loose-limbed manner that’s likely to surface a lot more as the week runs on. By the closing title-song reprise, the band was flying and Bates grinning and gesticulating at the keyboards. A long Beatles-celebrating coda that took in Penny Lane (with a perfectly nailed account of the original’s piccolo trumpet solo), Strawberry Fields and an audience-chanting All You Need Is Love proclaimed pretty loudly that the maverick music-lover from Beckenham has another quirky winner on his hands.
• At Ronnie Scott’s, London, until 9 September. Box office: 020-7439 0747.
