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, without doubt, the most profound of all the musical relationships that I’ve had. We met through Django Bates, all three of us, as teenagers, looking for opportunities to play and to learn how to become jazz musicians, whether in rehearsal bands, evening jazz classes or just get-togethers round at somebody’s house. The first real Buckley/Batchelor frontline appearances were with Django’s house band at Johnny Edgecombe’s small venue in a mostly derelict riverside wharf in Rotherhithe. Later, when Chris went to study at Leeds College of Music and I was doing my last year at the university there, we formed The Chris Batchelor Sextet featuring soon to become Loose Tubes trombonist, John Harborne, Peter Beckmann on guitar and Andy Pepper, a fellow geologist, on drums. Back in London we worked together regularly in bands on the African and Latin American scenes as well as working on our own projects such as Orchestra Rafiki and The Buckley/Batchelor Quartet.

“We definitely seem to understand and feel music in the same way. The fact that we both come from similar south-east London working-class backgrounds may have something to do with it. Both our Dads were massively into music, and particularly massively into jazz. It’s interesting that when we started working together in African and Latin American bands we both really connected with the music. Those sorts of musics are so much about groove and harmonic simplicity, and for me and Chris digging in to a simple repeated horn line was our idea of musical paradise. 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; utilising the power of repetition. Doing all that horn-line stuff meant that we really matched our sounds and our rhythmic concepts, which profoundly shaped our approach to everything else we did. For example, in a freer jazz setting, if one of us were playing a repeated melodic line, the other might pick up on it, play it and then harmonise it…..and we’ve always seemed to have a joint inner sense of when it was time to move on…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