Chris Bates' RED 5

In 2011, I was touring a lot and I caught myself reflecting on all my experiences over the last 20 years. I’m not normally one to look back (except to learn from my own playing) but while on the road I found myself in places I had been many years ago under different musical circumstances and I began to see a vague continuity between the past and the now. This connection had been laying dormant for many years as the twists and turns of life happened to me and I felt an up swell of inspiration and a faint momentum building towards an unknown goal. As an exercise in creativity and curiosity I wrote down all the combinations of people I could think of that I had played or recorded with. As I sat looking at the list and reflecting on the musical aspects of all those experiences I saw a very wide scope of art with integrity and I was proud of those achievements. However it occurred to me that there was a distinct cut-off point to my compositional output and my overall pursuit of freedom in music. Somewhere along the line I had stopped composing and I had dropped some very early influences off my musical map and I had never returned to them. With this realization fresh in my mind I started to cross off a number of people and musical combinations from this list. Any one group or person who I was actively playing with was immediately eliminated since all of those roads were being explored and honed already. There was a conscious decision to not use a chordal instrument in order to free up the bass role and I just felt like I needed that since I play in so many situations with guitarists and pianists. What will be new and fresh? Who amongst all these people do I get to play with the least? My brother JT Bates! Although we had played off and on our whole lives the bulk of the playing I did with my brother JT was in the 1990’s. As members of the sextet Motion Poets we recorded 3 albums and toured heavily for 5 years. Since the end of that band we had not really played in a project together of our own design. I knew that he would be the perfect fit for the music that was starting to brew in my head. This new music combines the 3-horn writing of the Motion Poets with the rhythmic and sonic explorations of Dave Holland and Ornette Coleman. In addition to those main influences I have been seeking out ways to incorporate the music of the African diaspora into my writing for a long time. I knew I would need a strong horn section of players who could blend and intonate without the support of a chordal instrument. I thought of my good friend, saxophonist Chris Thomson immediately and had trumpeter Zack Lozier in mind as well since he was a new collaborator. The 3rd chair was still up for grabs when I played a gig with JT and Zack and my Atlantis band mate Brandon Wozniak. After that gig I knew the musical energy between Zack and Brandon was strong and that it would be no problem for CT to fit right in. With the idea for the instrumentation and players in place I began writing and this is the result! This is a band page for the musical adventures of Chris Bates and his band Red 5. Stream New Hope at www.chrisbates.bandcamp.com