October 2020
John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb: Not only did these four musicians support Miles Davis on his famous album »Kind of Blue«, one of the most groundbreaking records in music history, but they also accompanied him on his first tour through Europe in 1960. The concert agency Lippmann + Rau managed to book the band on one of their tour nights and so it happened, that the Miles Davis Quintet played their first concert of »Jazz at the Philharmonic« in Germany at the congress hall in Frankfurt. 60 years later, the Frankfurt Radio Bigband now dedicates a whole program to this significant era and performs the works of Miles Davis in new arrangements written by the chief conductor Jim McNeely.
Jim McNeely, conductor
Friday, October 2nd 2020
18:00 + 20:30 h
Frankfurt
hr-Sendesaal
Saturday, October 3rd 2020
18:00 + 20:30 h
Gießen
Stadttheater
German version and ticket link
The hr-Bigband will be celebrating the 100th birthday of Charlie Parker, the brilliant innovator and inventor of modern jazz, together with Django Bates and a live audience in the Alte Oper on Wednesday 28th of october 2020.
"Charlie Parker was a hero of my childhood," says Django Bates, "and who would you believe this amazing statement if not him, the exceptional British musician who has stirred and inspired the European jazz scene since the 80s? "While my school friends were arranging little quasi-altars for athletes like goalkeeping legend Gordon Banks in their rooms, I had a self-modelled plasticine figure of Charlie Parker standing in my room," Bates continues. It's entirely conceivable that he was already living out his penchant for eccentricity in this way. Because Django Bates does everything in his very own way (see the french "accent grave" in the band name). He broke off his composition studies at the Royal College of Music in London after two weeks and instead conquered new musical terrain by composing for the Loose Tubes. This big band, consisting of the best musicians of his generation, caused a worldwide sensation with its mixture of anarchic humour, musical sophistication and virtuoso joy of playing. After the dissolution of the Loose Tubes, Django Bates further developed his very special composition and arrangement style with his own big band Delightful Precipice.
Commissioned works for various orchestras followed, as well as the highest international awards, such as the Danish Jazzpar Prize in 1997, which was regarded as the "Nobel Prize of Jazz" until its recruitment in 2005. As a composer and instrumentalist, but also as a professor in Copenhagen, London and Berne, he has meanwhile influenced two generations of young musicians with his forward-looking rhythmic and harmonic concepts and made a significant contribution to the artistic substance and independence of European jazz.
On the occasion of his 40th stage anniversary and his 60th birthday (on 2 October) Django Bates is releasing the album "Tenacity". On this big band album Bates not only plays new compositions but also draws a bow back to the hero of his childhood, Charlie Parker. Dizzy Gillespie summed up the meaning of the term: "If jazz musicians had to pay royalties for the melodic building blocks of their improvisations, they all went to Charlie Parker. In fact, the musician of the century died impoverished at the age of 34 - the most prominent victim of the drug consumption rampant among jazz musicians at the time. On his 100th birthday, the brilliant bebop pioneer is being paid homage in many places, but only rarely in a large orchestra and even more rarely as congenially as by Django Bates. He chases the craggy tone sequences of Charlie "Yardbird" Parker through the big band turbo in his typical idea-spraying manner and gives us a reencounter with the bebop genius, which feels as thrilling today as it did for his contemporaries.
"If music exists only on paper, it is nothing more than a dream. To bring it to life, to breathe its real sound into it, that requires practice, courage and perseverance," writes Django Bates about his new album, which he recorded with the Swedish Norrbotten Big Band. But music is only really brought to life in front of a live audience. And so we are looking forward to this concert with the hr-Bigband in the Alte Oper, where they already caused a sensation in 2016 together with Django Bates and his two band members. At that time they celebrated the "Sgt. Pepper" album of the Beatles. In 2020 they celebrate Charlie Parker, Django Bates and (hopefully) also the fact that such a concert is possible despite a pandemic.
Because of the hygiene rules there must be no concert break. That's why the concert will be played in two one-hour sets in front of a new audience each time.
Django Bates' Belovèd:
Django Bates - piano, composition, arrangement, direction
Petter Eldh - Bass
Petter Bruun - Drums
hr-Bigband
Wednesday, October 28th 2020
18.00 + 20.30 h
Frankfurt
Alte Oper