Delightful Precipice

Delightful Precipice is a 19-piece British jazz big band/orchestra led by Django Bates.

Delightful Precipice contains many individual solo artists, music educators and bandleaders as ensemble members, including Julian Arguelles, Iain Ballamy, Eddie Parker, Steve Buckley, Mark Lockheart, Barak Schmool (F-Ire Collective) and Chris Batchelor. The band is a direct descendant of the 1980s jazz big band Loose Tubes, sharing most of the same personnel and (like the parent band) playing compositions written by Django Bates. The central difference between the two bands is that Bates is the clearly established bandleader and sole composer for Delightful Precipice (although the band has occasionally played music written outside the band by other band members).

Following a six-year career, Loose Tubes disbanded in 1990. Bates (who had been one of the band's major composers) formed Delightful Precipice in 1991 as one of two outlets for his continuing work. (The other was the Human Chain quartet, which had been in existence for several years already with varying lineups, and which now also formed the core of Delightful Precipice).

The original Delightful Precipice (named after the Bates-written title composition from the second Loose Tubes album) was an eighteen-piece outfit with a small string section and a small brass section including instruments not usually associated with jazz, such as French horn. Bates' first project with the new band was a commission from The Old Bull Arts Centre in Barnet, London. This was a series of new compositions to accompany work by one of Europe's leading new circus companies, Snapdragon Circus, and based primarily on Angela Carter's novel Nights at the Circus. The music was performed alongside circus acts under canvas in London for a week, and included delicacies such as a bagpipe-playing chicken on a piece called "Scotch Egg". Bates subsequently rearranged the band, dropping the string section and leaving it close to its current lineup of nineteen musicians but including those orchestral instruments uncommon to a jazz big band such as French horn, tuba and violin.

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