Django Bates: Saluting Sgt Pepper review

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.

For the full review see https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/05/django-bates-saluting-sgt-pepper-review-beatles-ronnie-scotts

At Ronnie Scott’s, London, until 9 September. Box office: 020-7439 0747.