As everyone with half an ear open to jazz knows, Loose Tubes, the British big-band pathfinders of the 1980s, sensationally reconvened last year. This collection of swansong pieces from Ronnie Scott’s in 1990 – plus their first new works in 25 years – beams with their old live-gig radiance, and rams home the members’ continuing creativity. Django Bates’s cascading Armchair March, Chris Batchelor’s early-Miles trumpet on a gorgeous John Harborne ballad, and the gospelly title track (the Pied Piper anthem that they used to lead cheering punters marching round Soho) are all captured with vivid immediacy. The new music (from Jazz on Radio 3’s live recordings in 2014) is a shade more sedate, but not by much. Bates’s As I Was Saying (opening with everybody counting in different tempos, before horns barge and slide around a staccato hook), the fusion broodings of Eddie Parker’s Bright Smoke, Cold Fire, and Chris Batchelor’s Creeper, with its glimpses of free-jazz and waltzing Carla Bley, all confirm the returned Loose Tubes as an orchestra of today. They play Herts Jazz and Ronnie Scott’s in London in September.
