Buckley-Batchelor: Zone-B

Steve Buckley – saxophones
Chris Batchelor – trumpet
Rob Luft – guitar
Tom Herbert – bass
Gene Calderazzo – drums

National treasure Steve Buckley, alto – and pennywhistle – magician with iconoclastic big band Loose Tubes, furthers his telepathic musical relationship with all-embracing Tubes trumpeter Chris Batchelor in this red-hot supergroup.

The frontline Buckley-Batchelor pairing – one of the most extraordinary in jazz – has been a long and fruitful one, dating back to before Tubes, of which they were two of the founder members in late 1983. Their music has always been highly eclectic, reflecting their wide range of musical experiences, drawing on anything from Latin American to East European Folk, or from Congolese Soukous to free jazz. Previous projects include the internationally acclaimed and BBC award winning trans-Atlantic group Big Air (with Oren Marshall, Myra Melford and Jim Black), described by Chris May in All About Jazz as “…funky and unbuttoned as a chimp on acid”.

Zone B is their latest joyous and freewheeling project, presenting vibrant original music with an emphasis on groove and featuring a world-class rhythm section of guitar star Rob Luft (Django Bates, John Surman, Iain Ballamy), bassist Tom Herbert (Sons Of Kemet, Polar Bear, The Smile) and drummer Gene Calderazzo (Pharoah Sanders, Partisans, Randy Brecker).

Steve said: “My relationship with Chris is probably my most profound relationship in music. The reason why is kind of interesting in a way, because we met doing the same thing, when we were first playing, trying to get something together, so we’d find ourselves in these little rehearsal bands or with Django Bates when he had his band at Johnny Edgecombe’s little venue next to the Thames – when Chris went to Leeds College and I was doing my last year at the university there, we had this band the Chris Batchelor Septet/Sextet with John Harborne, and Peter Beckmann, he was playing guitar, and this guy Andy Pepper, who was a geologist, who was on the same course as me, he was playing drums.

“We started playing together and we come from similar backgrounds, so maybe there’s something there – we both came from working-class type of backgrounds in south-east London. Both our Dads were massively into music, massively into jazz. It’s a kind of weird thing, because once we started doing gigs together, with African bands – we were both really into African music, and we started doing Latin-American music, and we were both really into that sort of music, and really kind of related to it. Those sorts of musics are so much about simplicity and repetition, which me and Chris really seemed to enjoy. And when we started playing in Ashley Slater’s Microgroove, it was the same thing. We both just loved doing that in a way that a lot of jazz players don’t. Repetition gives it that power, it’s like an engine revving up on the motorway. Doing all the horn-line stuff meant that we really matched our sound, really matched our rhythmic concepts. If you were doing a horn line, the other would quickly just pick up on it, play it and harmonise it. We always seemed to know when it was time to stop repeating that particular thing. We had a sense of the way things were supposed to be, somehow.”

PRAISE FOR THE 1997 BUCKLEY-BATCHELOR ALBUM ‘LIFE AS WE KNOW IT’:
“A powerful, highly considered set of creative jazz pieces… the blend of world beats, complex rhythms and rich textures provides a perfect setting for the two leaders’ array of horns” – **** The Penguin Guide To Jazz Recordings
ON THE 2009 RELEASE ‘BIG AIR’:
“The best British jazz record for 20 years” – Brian Morton, Jazz Journal
“The tunes are all terrific, and they’re explored with a shifting variation of mood that’s never off the boil.” – ***** John Fordham, The Guardian
“…a remarkable album, literally bursting with ideas. The sudden shifts in moods and styles don’t make it the easiest of albums to write about, most of the tunes end up in a completely different place from where they started out. But that of course is half the fun, each track is something of an adventure and proof that at its best jazz can still be the sound of surprise. The free and written elements complement each other perfectly to create an adventurous brand of music that is still eminently listenable.” – **** The Jazz Mann
“It’s a terrific ensemble offering both oomph and sensitivity, as in the opener of Buckley’s “The Wizard”. Elsewhere, there’s Balkan-sounding mournfulness, New Orleans funk…” – The Independent
“There are loads of circus moments, jazz funk, folky bits and serene Far Eastern shadings. All the players are in fine form and it’s great to hear such strong personalities all at play in a happy kind of ordered chaos” – Peter Bacon, The Jazz Breakfast