Winter Truce (and Homes Blaze) (1995)
10 tracks, 67 minutes
Doesn’t seem to be anywhere to stream or download this online, apparently. I’ve put together a YouTube playlist of five tracks from the album that have already been uploaded there, so that you can get a small feel for the album, and you can buy the CD from Amazon or Discogs.
With yesterday’s Winter in America and today’s Winter Truce (and Homes Blaze), you’d almost think it was winter outside the window as well. What a strange serendipity.
On this album, pianist Django Bates leads a big band set-up of some of the biggest names in UK jazz at the time. True to his boundary-pushing and forward-thinking form, however, the music they make is quite a world away from the standard big band fare. The rest of the arrangements treat the 15-piece ensemble more like an expansive small band; that ultra-cheesy swing sound is only present in a handful of moments and always used in subversion.
The result is a set full of noise and chaos that falls just on the right side of avant-garde. Well, it does for me at least, your mileage may vary. There are unpredictable and angular melodies, dizzyingly fast and wending lines, out-there harmonies that switch between heavy dissonance and ludicrously simple chords, time signatures that would need a maths professor to work out. Influences from funk and Latin music abound, and there’s a slight soul sway in there occasionally, but all of it is quickly taken into outer space and back so many times within each piece. Even the only cover on the album, a version of the theme from Scorsese’s New York, New York, is turned into a cacophonous Latin-prog-jazz-metal excursion.
In all of its pandemonium, there’s so much fun in the album. It’s obvious that the musicians are at the top of their game in terms of skill, and the creativity is off-the-scale, so that it doesn’t feel like a dry exercise in quirkiness without purpose or an exploration of the borders of any particular type of music for an academic curiosity. It fizzes with electricity enough to turn a well-known ensemble template into a completely different beast. That energy is captured most obviously in the album’s joyous conclusion, in a reprise of the disc’s opening track ‘You Can’t Have Everything’, starting with a wild penny whistle solo and ending with a triumphant all-together-now horns-blaring, arms-around-each-other singing-on-New-Years-Eve but still occasionally dissonant finale. Winter Truce (and Homes Blaze) is a big band album, but not one from any planet you or I have visited.
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