John Fordham 

Loose Tubes ride again: Django Bates and friends on reforming their legendary jazz orchestra

Loose Tubes, the boundary-busting jazz orchestra who once played a Debenhams escalator, are back. They explain why they feel it's time to return to their glorious controlled chaos. By John Fordham
  
  

Loose Tubes reconvening in London in 2014
'We don’t want to be our own tribute band' … Loose Tubes reconvening in London earlier this year ahead of their live dates in May. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian

It feels like the biggest comeback since Lazarus – the reunion of the Loose Tubes orchestra, almost a quarter-century after this original, anarchic Chinese dragon of a band sounded their last rampant fanfare.

Between 1984 and 1990, the Loose Tubes evolved from a ragged workshop gathering of fledgling jazzers, students and a scattering of hardened pros into the first jazz orchestra to play the Proms (and maybe the first guests of any genre to deliver an anti-nuclear protest from the stage). They were also the Pied Pipers who led Ronnie Scott's audiences dancing around Soho, unlikely guests on Terry Wogan's TV chat show, an incubator for Mercury prize contenders and hitmaking dancefloor producers, and role models whose influence still pervades contemporary music-making and teaching across Europe.

They will reconvene – all 21 of them, reeled in from outposts as scattered as Wales, Denmark and Brazil – next month at the Cheltenham Jazz festival and then at Ronnie Scott's in London, playing the unique world-jazz repertoire of their heyday, as well as premiering four new pieces commissioned by Radio 3.

It was composer and original member Django Bates's idea, he confesses. A few years ago he began releasing previously unheard Tubes material, and was surprised by the level of interest. "Seeing the photos again, and realising that we're all still on planet Earth, it just seemed fun to get back on a stage together," he tells me, "and with 2014 being the 30th anniversary of our first gigs, that fixed the date." The former members were all keen, although, for some, new material was the clincher. As one of the composers of the new works, trumpeter Chris Batchelor, puts it, "we don't want to be our own tribute band".

Loose Tubes began at a workshop launched in 1984 by respected composer and educator Graham Collier, who wanted to introduce the impressive but unruly new jazz generation to the disciplines of big-ensemble playing. Bates and Steve Berry soon began turning up to rehearsals with their own pieces, and within months the young throng had a name and a new home at Wood Wharf Studios in Greenwich, a legendary location where Dire Straits and Iron Maiden had recorded, inhabited in the 1980s by the punk-jazz guitarist Billy Jenkins, an anarchic kindred spirit. He gave them the run of the place every Monday, and the Tubes began to loosen.

"People came into those rehearsals with black rings under their eyes from being up all night copying out 21 parts," remembers Bates. "There was no Sibelius notation software to help you then. We were all staking a claim – I'm going to dig here, Steve Berry's digging over there. And you came in with your piece, wanting to knock everybody out with it."

Alongside the then 24-year-old Bates, Steve Berry wrote the ensemble's first original pieces. "We stumbled into that space we wound up in. We didn't intend it, it was just youthful exuberance," he recalls. "It was Life of Brian syndrome – they're all attributing messianic characteristics to him and he's saying, 'But I'm just Brian.'" Eddie Parker, the composer and flautist who was the band's resident hippie in their early days (and still appears to be), points to the jazz dogmas of the time that the Tubes unconcernedly bypassed, in the process breaking down the fences that separated jazz listeners from the fans of almost every other music. "A lot of 80s British jazz was great, but there were always people itching to say 'that's not jazz' about anything new," he says. "To listeners who were interested, but didn't know the tradition, that could feel like a barbed-wire fence. We knew the history, but we were also saying, look, there's these classical elements we could use, or this Brazilian rhythm, Congolese drums, rock, bagpipe music, South African jazz – stuff from all over the world."

In its comet's arc across the British jazz scene in those six years, Loose Tubes turned popular perceptions of big bands upside down, showing that the legacies of Duke Ellington or Charles Mingus could be respected without being cloned. They veered between jokey panto music, Zappa-like rock and hauntingly rich tapestries of orchestral sound. They made four albums (with 1988's Open Letter overseen by the veteran Miles Davis producer Teo Macero), took Ronnie Scott's by storm, played the Proms in 1987 and toured widely. They also donated their services to causes ranging from CND to Anti-Apartheid, and staged musical demos at the drop of a woolly hat. One such was an impromptu show on the escalators at Bristol's Debenhams (to support the 1988 Severnside Campaign Against Radiation). The staff tried to repulse them by spraying perfume at them – the band took that as a compliment.

"We were footloose, we had no commitments, and it was fantastic fun," says Parker. "The longer you sat amid that huge sound, with five saxophones and four trumpets and four trombones and a tuba wrapped around you, and the more you heard it, the more you could write for it, and hear how the voicings work." The non-hierarchical setup spawned collective decision-making about the repertoire, that was, as Parker says "sometimes not spoken, and sometimes very much spoken". A composer of a serious piece might resent the levity of its interpretation, or be unexpectedly glad of it. The improvisers might discover the dark heart of a piece of music never written that way. If a piece was too daft, or too difficult, it might spark a brief row, or just quietly fall by the wayside. Some works had difficult births, but grew up happy, including Parker's atonal first composition for the band, which he describes as "like Ligeti, Berio, Eric Dolphy and Anthony Braxton all mixed together – hard to write, harder to play, and I almost lost confidence in it. But it ended up being one of the band's most frequently played pieces."

Loose Tubes called it a day just as the briefly fashionable "British jazz boom" of the 1990s was beginning ("we were never good at signing up to movements," says Bates) but their influence lasted, and went much deeper. Britain's multi-arts F-ire Collective (which embraced such stars as drummer Seb Rochford and the pop-savvy Acoustic Ladyland, and Mercury-nominated pianist Kit Downes) was founded by teacher and former Loose Tubes roadie Barak Schmool, and F-ire in its turn helped spawn the energetic Loop Collective and other self-help music initiatives around the country. As a former professor at Copenhagen's Rhythmic Music Conservatory and now a professor at Bern's University of the Arts, Bates's protegees have included the exciting young Norwegian saxophonist Marius Neset and the subtle Swedish vocalist Josefine Lindstrand. At London's Trinity Laban conservatoire, Chris Batchelor and Tubes/Polar Bear saxophonist Mark Lockheart taught acclaimed young composer Laura Jurd, and as an improv teacher at Chetham's music school in Manchester, Steve Berry introduced jazz to the teenage Gwilym Simcock, then a purely classical player. The turmoil and intuitive organisation of the Loose Tubes sound is plainly audible in the Jurd-directed Chaos Orchestra, Manchester's Beats & Pieces and many other large-scale bands around Europe.

"You see music students today posting facts on social media about Loose Tubes, a band that was defunct before they were born," Bates marvels. "That's why we can't just play the music of our past," says Berry. "I had no expectation of a reunion ever happening. But now it has, I'm keenly aware there's a new and very creative generation coming up, fighting for oxygen in a tough economic climate. If we take resources from them for this, we've got to honour them through what we play."

• Loose Tubes play the Cheltenham Jazz Festival on 3 May, and Ronnie Scott's Club 5-10 May.

 

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