As Composer
In recent years, Bates has concentrated on writing large scale compositions on commission. These include:
- "Dream Kitchen" for percussionist Evelyn Glennie
- "Fine Frenzy" for the Shobhana Jeyasingh Dance Company
- "What It's Like to be Alive", a piano concerto for Joanna MacGregor and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
- "2000 Years Beyond UNDO", a concerto for electric keyboard which was performed at the millennium Barbican Festival
Bates worked closely with director Lucy Bailey on several theatre projects, including Gobbledegook for The Gogmagogs, Baby Doll, (Birmingham Rep, National Theatre, Albery Theatre), Stairs to the Roof (Chichester Festival Theatre), The Postman Always Rings Twice (West Yorkshire Playhouse, Albery Theatre) and Titus Andronicus(The Globe Theatre). They also worked on a short film You Can Run. Other theatre work includes Greg Doran’s production of As You Like It (RSC), and Campbell Graham’s Out There!.
Django was the inaugural Artistic Director of the music festival FuseLeeds in 2004. He used this opportunity to initiate the first orchestral commission for Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead). Django also commissioned sixty composers including Laurie Anderson, Gavin Bryars, Sir Patrick Moore and John Zorn, to write one bar each. He then quilted these bars into the piece "Premature Celebration" which was performed by Evan Parker and the London Sinfonietta to celebrate Evan’s 60th birthday.
The Wire voted Django "Best UK Jazz Composer" in 1987 and 1990. In 1997, he won the Jazzpar Prize. In 2008, he was nominated for the PRS New Music Award. He was awarded a fellowship by the Leeds College of Music in 1995.
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“Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.”
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