“I once travelled from Copenhagen to a London jazz club to see Lucy Railton and Benoît Delbecq performing a long piece of Morton Feldman that was unknown to me. As the music ‘unfeld’ (began to unfold) I realised there was no way I could stay awake. Telling myself that this was OK as long as I woke up before the end, I slept deeply, somehow fully conscious of every timeless floating sound, and at a certain point the composition gently informed me that I should prepare to awake.
“Reflecting on this later, I thought, ‘How masterly to write music that is so abstract, and yet so immaculately structured that its form somehow already exists within you; what a wonderful inventor Feldman was’.”
Django Bates, top, whose Saluting Sgt. Pepper, with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, was released in 2017. Django plays the Barbican, London, in the spring of 2019 in the oudist Anouar Brahem’s Blue Maqams band, Dave Holland and Nasheet Waits completing the constellation. Details.