Slim Boy, Phat

Someday, the fat kid will be king. It might be a long time before Chunk from Goonies makes a triumphant return to Hollywood. And grade schoolers may never stop being teased for wearing "Hefty"-size Fruit of the Looms. But in the meantime, a slow liberation of the liberally proportioned will be on its way. And if local musician JT Bates has his way, the revolution will begin at the wave pool.

Sitting in the Turf Club's Clown Lounge, Bates sucks thoughtfully on a cigarette, gazes up at the ceiling ringed with tiny, pulsing Christmas lights, and contemplates the small victories of the fat kid. "There's this wave pool in Blaine," Bates starts, "and there's always all of these skinny kids in the water. But once you get a few fat kids in there, the water level starts rising. That means you can't get too many fat kids in there at once or else everything would overflow and there would be some kind of flood. So Adam [Lewis] and I thought, why not make Fat Kid Wednesdays when only the fat kids could come? That way the water park doesn't get ruined, and the fat kids can have their own day."

He's joking, of course. But something about Bates--the drummer for the jazz trio Fat Kid Wednesdays--seems perpetually serious and intense, even when he's being playful. One gets the feeling that the spiky-haired, soul-patched musician has always been that way. Perhaps that's because when most seven-year-olds were splurging their allowances on pop records and She-Bopping along to Cyndi Lauper, Bates was picking up his drumsticks and listening to his first jazz album: the Buddy Rich and Max Roach drum battle Rich Versus Roach. Or maybe it's the fact that at age 20 he was already performing around town, playing drums alongside his father's trumpet in the Don Bates Great Big Band. Or that in his early 20s, he was playing regular gigs at the Dakota and touring nationally with the jazz quartet Motion Poets (see City Pages' "The Motion Carries," February 3, 1999). Now, at age 26, he's still some 15 years younger and probably more talented than your average Sam Woodyard-imitating snare massager at the Dakota. In any case, Bates is really paddling against the waves made by the older, more conventional jazz scene in the Twin Cities.

There's a cool, submarine aesthetic about his Turf performances with the other kids in Fat Kid Wednesdays (who, strangely enough, perform on Mondays at the Turf). In front of the blue-curtained stage, Adam Lindz sways around in small circles while plucking and thumping his upright bass erratically, gripping the instrument as if anchored by it. Michael Lewis (also of Happy Apple) rocks back and forth, gasping for air over his saxophone reed, noodling an Interstellar Space-style chord progression and not once opening his eyes during the process. Bates thrashes his arms about in a furious swimming motion, creating an arrhythmic clatter that is simultaneously enthralling and confusing. The audience sits, transfixed--bobbing their heads like spring-necked figurines perched on the dashboard of a speedboat.

DJ Andrew Broder of the local indie/hip-hop band the Fog--a frequent attendee of Bates's performances--notes respectfully of the frantic drummer, "The guy looks like he's fighting with the drum set! Sometimes I look out there and I think about the times that he's played with the Fog and I think, God, don't you get bored just playing rock stuff with us, JT?"

Tonight Bates looks anything but uninterested. As he sits for this interview and prepares for another Fat Kid show, it's evident that talking about jazz is not his favorite thing to do: When I ask him how he would describe Fat Kid Wednesdays' sound to jazz fans, he says, "I wouldn't. I would tell them to come and watch the show.") But discussing his passion certainly gets him excited to play. The head-bobbing jazz neophytes who encircle him, drink cheap beers, drape their thrift-store jackets over their chairs, and eagerly await the Fat Kid experience are (like Bates himself) young, white hipsters with a contagious enthusiasm for improvisational music. In a bookcase in the corner of the stage, a novel peeks over a slew of spines. Beat, it says, and it seems appropriate for this nuevo-bohemian crowd. (Later, when I pull the book out of the case and glimpse the entire title, I discover that it is actually called Beat Jet Lag. Oh well. Perhaps Bates should hold onto it until the day that he makes it big and begins touring in Europe.)