The Loose Tubes big band are a big, maverick family accustomed to relating more by intuition than house-rules. Their gigs can occasionally be entangled as well as joyous affairs. The first night of the band’s 2015 Ronnie Scott’s season, marking the launch of their fine album Arriving, resembled a buzz of parallel conversations for a while – an inbuilt risk with music as rhythmically flighty, melodically intricate and freely interpreted as theirs – but when they found each other’s range, the later stages were as euphorically original as only the Tubes at full throttle can be.
Django Bates’s Armchair March, a typical clamour of motifs stepping excitedly on each other’s heels, emerged from a kind of primordial soup of percussion rumbles, horn mutterings and Iain Ballamy’s gyrating soprano sax intro. Two back-to-back Eddie Parker pieces shifted through bustling swing, barked riffs, free-jazz and eventually reggae. Then Bates’s dementedly fast-moving Eden Express (an old Loose Tubes staple) and his careering, accordion-like keyboard improv on it, cranked up the band’s thoroughbred engine.
Chris Batchelor’s Creeper, a standout new work from the Arriving album, dramatically mingled an anthemic theme coloured by Julian Argüelles’s rich baritone saxophone sound, sidesteps into sci-fi whirrings and solemn waltzing, and lustrous low-brass chords. John Harborne’s beautiful ballad Ⓐ drew fragile and misty trumpet lyricism from Batchelor, while Parker’s multi-idiomatic Bright Smoke, Cold Fire touched on 1970s jazz-fusion and north African music, and Arriving’s title track finally introduced – to the audience’s delight – the kind of tight, soul-bluesy grooving the band had been dodging, with typical impishness, all night.
Their encore was an exultant marching-band dirge, in which the horn players took to wandering the aisles while Bates slashed through the rich, gospelly brass harmonies with incandescent freebop improvisations at the keys. They didn’t take to the streets as they used to, but maybe those distant memories of misspent youth will come back to them later in the week.
- At Ronnie Scott’s, London, until 26 September. Box office: 020-7439 0747.
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