If the late jazz-fusion superband Weather Report was a hypertuned Ferrari, then Django Bates's Human Chain is a hand-painted hot rod with alternately misfiring sparkplugs and a throttle stuck wide open.
Bates was here staging a rare gig for the immaculately dishevelled crossover band he leads with saxophonist Iain Ballamy, plus Martin France on drums and Mike Mondesir on bass guitar. The occasion, naturally, was a benefit for Elton John. Yes, yes, I know. Bates remarked that the British sense of irony could be dying out, because he's encountered little but blank looks ever since he announced it.
Bates's logic is that Elton, like Stoke Newington's beloved Vortex jazz club, is having cashflow problems, and the boy might appreciate a few quid from Monday night's door takings - and Bates is adamant they're really going to send it. Then, when Elton gets back in the black, he might feel like returning the compliment: the Vortex needs £1m by next March in order to stay open.
In two lurchingly furious sets of cruising grooves, bunny-hopping time-signature collisions and sweepingly inventive soloing, Human Chain trenchantly reminded the audience of how many more things jazz can be than just the current TV-documentary version.
Over two long sets, they delivered interminglings of squirty free-jazz fragmentation and intricate Lennie Tristano-like bop lines with Cuban underpinnings; fast almost-swing (with Bates's jazz-buff persona yelling "yeaahh!" throughout Ballamy's careering sax solo); and a multi-tempo My Way with a Mike Mondesir rap.
Bates's delivery of Elton's hits was surprisingly decorous. Both the pianist and Ballamy were at their most un-ironically lyrical on the abstract reverie Is There Anyone up There? The encore, a free-funk collective blast called Architects, was the point at which quartet, venue and ecstatic audience most closely resembled an integrated organism. He does it by roundabout journeys, but Bates always knows how to Do the Right Thing.
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