Django Bates: Saluting Sgt Pepper review – jazz maverick's winning Beatles tribute

Ronnie Scott’s, London
The unruly composer and the Frankfurt Radio Big Band began tentatively but soon let fly on an exhilarating reimagining of the Fab Four’s album

Django Bates doesn’t play other people’s music often, but when he does, resemblances to the originals can be opaque. The unruly fiftysomething jazz composer has battered New York, New York into a free-jazz thrash, for instance, and interpreted Billie Holiday’s classic Solitude on a pub piano with two spoons and a bunch of keys hanging under the lid. But remaking the quixotic 1967 Beatles classic Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has turned him almost respectful, to judge by his Saluting Sgt Pepper album, and the first of 12 shows he and a crack German band are performing at Ronnie Scott’s this week.

Bates’ Sgt Pepper tribute with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band features skilful Copenhagen vocal trio Eggs Laid By Tigers closely mimicking Beatles’ harmonies, even if terse saxophone improv and huffing trombones constantly swoop and squall around them. A tough score and a short rehearsal made the band tentative at first, and balancing the creative tension between the faithfulness of the vocals and the typical dissonances of Bates’ harmonies was elusive early on. Perhaps mindful of the late show to come, the leader also pushed quickly through the opening songs when the band might usefully have been able to stretch out more – but the groove settled down and lead vocalist Martin Ullits Dahl grew in confidence on a vivid account of Fixing a Hole, pursued by seesawing sax and brass hooks and Stuart Hall’s penetrating guitar lines.