Django Bates doesn't sound like anyone else at the piano, and that's not a compliment people hand out lightly in jazz, where everyone claims to be an original. With Bates you actually hear it: chords that lean slightly off their hinges, melodies that take a wrong turn on purpose and somehow end up somewhere better. He trained as a pianist but he's also played tenor horn, composed for full orchestras, and run bands with names as strange as the music — Human Chain, Loose Tubes, the Delightful Precipice.

Loose Tubes is where most people first heard him, a sprawling 21-piece London big band in the 1980s that treated jazz tradition like a toy box rather than a museum. Bates was one of the writers and ringleaders, and the band's mix of funk, folk, cartoon humor and real compositional ambition left a mark on a generation of British players — Iain Ballamy among them. When Loose Tubes finally called it quits, Bates kept chasing that same restless mix on his own terms, through Delightful Precipice and the orchestra he later built around similar ideas.

The record most people point to if they want to understand him is Beloved Bird (2010), his reworking of Charlie Parker tunes with his trio Belovèd, featuring Petter Eldh on bass and Peter Bruun on drums. It shouldn't work — bebop melodies stretched, slowed, bent into odd shapes, sometimes sung wordlessly by Bates himself — but it does, because he respects the tunes enough to actually mess with them rather than just replay them reverently. That's the whole Bates method in miniature: take something everyone thinks they know and turn it a few degrees until it looks unfamiliar again.

He's also spent years teaching, notably in Copenhagen, which probably explains why so many younger European improvisers mention him as an influence even when their own music sounds nothing like his. Bates was never chasing a hit or a sound that would travel easily — his records can be prickly, overstuffed, a little exhausting in the best sense. If you want tidy, elegant trio jazz, start elsewhere. If you want to hear a composer who treats a wrong note as an opportunity rather than a mistake, Django Bates is exactly who you're looking for.