In a year which saw such (deservedly) lavish celebrations of The Beatles all-time masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band you really have to be a fool or crazy, or both, to take a full-on re-arranged tribute to one of the best modern music albums recorded. Or judging by his musical record from his Loose Tube on, you have to be avant-garde jazzman Django Bates. Avant-garde jazzman doing an essentially avant-garde concept rock album usually means one of two things - another masterpiece or a complete disaster.
What Django Bates gave us was neither. In association with Frankfurt Radio Big Band and Danish band Eggs Laid By Tigers (actually, mainly their lead singer Martin Dahl), Bates came with the best possible solution - a jazzy slant on the original that, rightfully so, does not swerve too much from the original melody lines and rhythmic movements of the originals. In most of the cases that work a charm. The introductory theme seems to be one of the best suited to such an approach and the big band swing approach works a charm. “With A Little Help From My Friends” also lends it well to the accented guitar, brass and electronic flourishes and gives a decisive indication of the direction in which Bates has approached Pepper’s: adding less is more.
“Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” is given a bit of a kaleidoscopic rhythm variation that does not in any way detracts from the genial original but gives it just another musical possibility. Here, as in some other songs, purists might be missing the original Liverpudlian Lennon/MacCarney accents, but Dahl tries his best, not always but usually successful. He covers it well with a fact that he has a very good singing voice. Bates does not miss the need to keep The Beatles gorgeous harmonies where needed, as he does in “Getting Better”. Of course, some of the songs lend themselves better than other to the big band arrangements, like “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and “When I’m Sixty-Four”, where the jazzy arrangements give that “alternative possibility” to the listeners. The track where Bates did the least interventions, smartly enough, is the closing “A Day In Life”, all with the orchestral crescendo and sustained piano(s) and just a bit of an organ touch added.
More listens only confirm that Django Bates knew exactly what he was doing when he tackled this masterpiece and that he has done it a real justice. At the end, a deserved (sustained applause!
