Django Bates & the Frankfurt Radio Big Band - Saluting Sgt. Pepper

The totally irrepressible creativity and ever-unconventional spirit of Django Bates swings into a completely new and unpredicted sphere. In collaboration with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band and Eggs Laid By Tigers, Django has reimagined the seminal Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most significant Rock album of all time.

Up until now the idea of Django exploring the Beatles catalogue would have been met with an emphatic no. However the opportunity to celebrate the 50th anniversary of an album that is a landmark musically and culturally was a challenge he couldn’t resist.

As Django explains: ‘My meeting with Sergeant Pepper came when I bought the album for my elder sister’s eighteenth birthday. An excellent gift. Through the closed door of her bedroom I would catch sonic glimpses… What a wealth of sounds, genres, effects, surprises, very generously scattered with words of madness and sanity’.

With his overpoweringly creative spirit, his anarchic sense of humour and his incredible level of musicality, approaching the arrangement process with a manifesto of ‘Freedom, not Licence’, Django’s work is typically inventive and visionary. Holding on to the original structures and keys, he gracefully folds his own colours, rhythms and sound into the music, resulting in a thoroughly kaleidoscopic examination of this iconic album.