CANCELLED: NDR Bigband & Charlie Bates

People, places and things – everything we’ve been missing during the pandemic: that’s the focus of a programme written by the young British composer and arranger Charlie Bates for the NDR Bigband.

»I want to hear from you« – when Geir Lysne, the musical director of the NDR Bigband, posted his call for people to take part in the »Podium for Arrangers and Composers« in October 2020, he could not have predicted the overwhelming response. Conceived as an initiative to encourage creative young musicians to try their hand at the big-band sound, around 170 highly skilled arrangers and composers had soon submitted their arrangements. One of the most striking among them was the English pianist, composer and arranger Charlie Bates.

»People, Places and Things«, the programme Bates wrote for his collaboration with the NDR Bigband, is actually fairly self-explanatory. The compositions for this programme are all about human encounters, both pleasant and less pleasant, about inspiring places and observations that impressed Bates before lockdown and contact reduction became words that described our everyday reality. Written during lockdown, these compositions are always also about the quiet melancholy associated with the memory of feelings and an aliveness that was no longer possible.