Belovèd BirdLost Marble  * * * * *

It may seem strange, after the imaginative, forensic and ferocious deconstruction of Scrapple from the Apple, Moose the Mooche(both based wholly or partly on that bop bible, I Got Rhythm) and Chi Chi, Now's the Timeand Billie's Bounce(all from the blues, also in bop's DNA), to call this a love letter to Charlie Parker, but it is. Bates, in a fine piano trio with Petter Eldh (bass) and Peter Bruun (drums), is absolutely brilliant throughout. They are awareness and adventure personified on Hot House, gorgeously lush on Star Eyes, wistful and tender on Laura, exuberantly logical on the quirky groove of My Little Suede Shoes. But all this pales beside the almost 20 minutes of glorious rubato playing on the final track, with the trio intuitively complicit in an oblique delve into Ah-Leu-Cha, so spontaneous and fluid that it's a shock to realise the original was yet another Rhythm variant. See djangobates.co.uk