The totally irrepressible creativity and ever-unconventional spirit of Django Bates swings into a completely new and unpredicted sphere. In collaboration with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band and Eggs Laid By Tigers, Django has reimagined the seminal Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most significant Rock album of all time.
Up until now the idea of Django exploring the Beatles catalogue would have been met with an emphatic "no". However the opportunity to celebrate the 50th anniversary of an album that is a landmark musically and culturally was a challenge he couldn’t resist.
As Django explains: ‘My meeting with Sergeant Pepper came when I bought the album for my elder sister’s eighteenth birthday. An excellent gift. Through the closed door of her bedroom I would catch sonic glimpses… What a wealth of sounds, genres, effects, surprises, very generously scattered with words of madness and sanity’.
With his overpoweringly creative spirit, his anarchic sense of humour and his incredible level of musicality, approaching the arrangement process with a manifesto of ‘Freedom, not Licence’, Django’s work is typically inventive and visionary. Holding on to the original structures and keys, he gracefully folds his own colours, rhythms and sound into the music, resulting in a thoroughly kaleidoscopic examination of this iconic album.
This music was commissioned by the Frankfurt Radio Big Band. Commission partners are the Norrbotten Big Band (Sweden), the Danish Radio Big Band, and the UMO Jazz Orchestra (Finland), joining in a spirit of international cooperation, some 50 years after the original summer of love.
CREDITS:
Produced by Django Bates & Tim Adnitt
Executive Producer: Olaf Stötzler
Recorded October 2016, Hörfunkstudio II, Hessischer Rundfunk (hr), Frankfurt/Main
Recording Producer: Axel Gutzler
Recording Engineer: Michael Wayszak
Mixed by Tim Adnitt in London
Mastered by Ray Staff at Air Mastering, Lyndhurst Hall, London
Life & Work
Bio:
Player of piano, keyboards, E♭ horn, vocals. Composer, improviser, band-leader, band-member. Journeyman.
Contact Information
Management/Booking:
Management:
Jeremy Farnell [email protected]
post:
Django Bates Management,
21 St John's Church Rd, London E9 6EJ
U.K
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).