Chain reactions

Once upon a time there was a group called the Powder Room Collapse Orchestra which, for its brief term on the planet, found an ecologically specific survival niche in the studio. There its molecules rapidly multiplied and recorded a score, inspired by Flann O'Brien's comic novel, The Third Police- man, and written by a man who now lives at the The Lost Marble Department in London, where he plays piano and peck horn (don't ask). He also has a brother with a trio - two recorders and a violin - called Been Bitten By A Monkey? I'm not making this up. Django Bates is the Third Policeman fan. "It was my first commission," he explains, "and I didn't know anything about being asked to write music and being paid for it. I suddenly got this call from what was called Eastern Arts in Lincoln, and because it was the first time I'd been asked, a whole vista of possibilities opened out and I couldn't cope with the variety."

He had just read The Third Policeman and it solved his dilemma. "I thought `I'll do something based on it' and it turned into a very ambitious kind of music theatre project. The music was recorded and the CD still exists - and it's got a kind of obscurity value, because it's on a very small label."

What was it about the book, in which a man and his bicycle mingle their molecules, that sparked off this music of the spheres? Or should I ask? "I suppose the form of the story," he answers, "and ending in a kind of endless cycle that's stuck; immediately you think `how could you do that in music?' and how it could be quite funny. My version ends with him kind of stuck there, with `Is it about a bicycle? Is it about a bicycle?' repeating, and then there's all these musical boxes - because half the people in the band just had new-born kids, so we had about 10 little nightlight musical boxes all playing their tunes in different keys!"

If all this gives some of the flavour of his puckish, surreal sense of humour, fair enough. He's an immensely likeable man, polite, gentle to the point of diffidence; if there's a big head anywhere there, some witch doctor must have shrunk it to vanishing point years ago and hung it out of sight in his hut. But it does nothing to convey the many-faceted, superb composer and pianist who, two years ago, won the Danish Jazzpar Prize, the jazz world's Oscar, or the sheer self-belief and determination that lie behind the soft-spoken, almost unassertive exterior.

He's nobody's pushover. After years of A level study on piano, violin and trumpet, he quit a coveted college place in 1979, just two weeks into a four-year degree course in composition.

"I thought: `hang on a minute; I don't need another four years of looking at everything from a classical perspective. I want to try other things out'. There were some other small reasons, like at the first lecture we were told that, as first-year students, we wouldn't be allowed to perform outside of the college, which was a very strange rule. And I'd just got my first job, playing once a week at this jazz club on the river Thames in a really romantic, old wharf situation, being the kind of support band to all these established British jazz musicians.

"That was very exciting to me, and I just thought if I had to choose between college and doing that, then I'd do that. It didn't occur to me that I could've carried on doing both and not said anything. But I've never regretted it. I think the amount of information I would've learnt during that four years didn't really take four years to get." A couple of good books on orchestration, he added, "and real life experience" did the trick.

Part of that real life experience included being a co-founder and pianist/composer of Loose Tubes, the exuberantly off-centre, seminal British big band of the 1980s, which was a nursery for some outstanding jazz talent. Sometimes the musical jokes were a bit relentless - a little light and shade would have helped - but there was no denying the sheer verve and commitment of the band.

"Absolutely. I'd agree," he says. "There was a major good thing about that band and a major problem, and they were both the same thing, in a way." In a nutshell, it was a co-operative in which everyone could have a voice. "That was sometimes frustrating, because you wanted to have a sensible form for a concert, but actually you ended up with a hotchpotch of ideas. But the good thing about it was this same thing; because everyone was totally involved, the level of commitment was 100 per cent."

Nowadays he has, effectively, three working bands; Human Chain, Quiet Nights and Delightful Precipice. Human Chain, with himself, Iain Bellamy (saxophone), Michael Mondesir (bass) and Martin France (drums), is the core, "the perfect social and musical balance", he believes. When the marvellous singer, Josefine Crnholm, is introduced, the Chain reaction becomes Quiet Nights. Add Human Chain to about 16 other musicians and the result is Delightful Precipice.

They're all very different. "Human Chain spent quite a few years playing music that I'd written which, although very earthy, was quite complex and dense - and quite loud and in your face," he explains. "With Delightful Precipice, there's more going on, but also I like to keep this thing which Loose Tubes had, which is a kind of earthy music, which does communicate instantly, even if it's very unlike stuff you've heard before, because it's moving through so many different kinds of moods very quickly and keeps the surprise level up. I suppose I write like that because it's what I like to hear myself."

Quiet Nights is utterly different, as Dublin audiences will hear next week. For one thing, much of the repertoire is standards, although he once swore he'd never do them because "everyone's doing it and it's a kind of political thing with Wynton and all that kind of stuff"; he means the American trumpeter and bandleader, Wynton Marsalis, by now so politically correct musically that he is an establishment figure in jazz.

He grins at the reminder. "Then I thought: `it's only interesting to say something like that if you then go and break your words'." Which is what he did.

In Copenhagen he found Josefine Crnholm at a jam session. "It was very competitive, lots of males, as usual, showing off, playing in silly styles. And she was just sitting there very quietly and laughing at some of it. And then she asked `can I do such and such a song?' and they said `yeah'.

"She got up and stood there while they did this intro - and it was all boisterous mucking about - and then she came in with the song and just sang it so beautifully, but with really total commitment, and everyone settled down behind her and she drew it all together. Of course, then everyone did a solo and it built up to this chaotic thing again. Then she waited coolly and patiently until the end and got up and sang the song out, not at all ruffled, just did her thing. And I thought: `that's exactly the way to do it'."

She became part of the awards concert, and Quiet Nights was born. He spent the £20,000 prize money making the group's debut CD, now released on Tim Berne's independent Screwgun label; the catalogue number, by the way, is screwu 70007. It doesn't make him a bad person.

He's also busy. The day I called he was finishing some music for a film of Tennessee Williams's Baby Doll and had just finished a work for Ereprij, a 12-piece Dutch band. "And I've got some stuff next year with an orchestra called the Britten Symphonia and Human Chain together, and I'm writing a keyboard concerto for myself to play on synthesisers. And also they'll be playing some stuff that I did with the London Sinfonietta, orchestral pieces which also involve Human Chain.

"In a way, I feel this is like Delightful Precipice - it's such a large band but with different sound possibilities, with lovely woodwind possibilities, and harp and the string section, which just expands these outwards. I don't see it as a different hat from the other stuff."

It means six concerts next year, with the programming up to him. "I haven't done much programming of other people's concerts and it appeals, where I can just go from Bach, to me, to Satie."

Which is where the brother and his unusual trio come in. Satie was a wonderful eccentric who gave his compositions unusual titles like Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear; he once famously pulled Debussy's leg about the chronologically plotted La Mer, saying that he loved it, "especially the little bit at a quarter to eleven".

He was off the wall in other ways. "He used to make business cards," explains Bates, "and give them out or leave them in places, and one of them says: `Been bitten by a monkey? Then contact such and such'. I do love that. I'm attracted to surrealism, I suppose. His music's very beautiful, though, as well as all that humour and wit." Without losing a marble, or two, something similar could be said of Quiet Nights.

Quiet Nights will perform at the HQ, Middle Abbey Street, on Thursday next at 8p.m. as part of ESB Dublin Jazz Week. To book phone 01-6725862