Having lately fallen under the spell of pianist Bill Evans, I went looking for his kind of jazz on the radio. I have a picture of my ideal station in mind. Many years ago, Donald Fagen wrote a song called The Nightfly. It described the story a lone-wolf disc jockey, passing the night on the fictional WJAZ, which provided “jazz and conversation from the foot of Mount Belzoni”. The cover of the album showed Fagen doing two things you wouldn’t be permitted to do in a modern radio studio: one is smoking, the other is actually playing records.
The internet offers us access to hundreds of jazz stations, most of which come from the USA, home of the music. These range from the evangelical WBGO (wbgo.org) in Newark, New Jersey, which Esquire magazine calls “the best jazz station in the galaxy”, to the automated AccuJazz (accujazz.com) which describes itself as “the future of jazz radio”. That means 75 different streams, neatly classified by era or style. From Tacoma, Washington comes KPLU (kplu.org), a National Public Radio member station offering two services: one a news and jazz service including such NPR favourites as All Things Considered and Car Talk between the music, the other a 24-hour jazz service turning out Wes Montgomery, Lou Donaldson, Pat Metheny et al round the clock, with occasional interruptions by an actual human being. There’s a fair sprinkling of cool jazz in the output of the French radio station FIP (fipradio.fr) whose praises have been sung in this column before. I finally found Evans closer to home on Dinner Jazz (weekdays, 7pm, Jazz FM) which was nice. However, no one is yet quite offering what the WJAZ in my head is playing.
Yeats: The Man And The Echo (Sunday, 7.45pm, Radio 4) takes the poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death and repurposes it as a remain-in-the-car-to-find-out-how-it-ends drama set in sub-prime Ireland in the era of internet gambling. It’s written by Lynda Radley and narrated by Eugene O’Hare.
In his previous ventures for Archive Hour, satirist Joe Queenan has fronted programmes on anger, irony and blame. None of them resound quite like A Brief History Of Shame (Saturday, 8pm, Radio 4), the subject of which has become even more ear-reddening since the recent publication of Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Ronson can be heard here, along with Peter Viggers (AKA the duck house MP) and, the king of this particular castle, Bill Clinton.
In the Sunday Feature: A Most Ingenious Paradox – Loving G&S To Death (Sunday, 6.45pm, Radio 3), Gilbert & Sullivan will be dragged before the bar of contemporary sensibilities to account for their enduring popularity, a state of affairs scandalously unsanctioned by “smart” opinion. It has contributions from Mike Leigh, Jonathan Miller and a brace of scholars and performers, all of whom, I trust, will tell the Tyrants Of Now where to get off.
Rachel Nicholson was one of triplets born to the artists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, neither of whom could spare much time away from their work to parent them too closely. Unsurprisingly, she remembers that she developed a love for music early in her life. In Private Passions (Sunday, 12noon, Radio 3) she talks from her attic in Hampstead about how music informs her painting. I’m grateful to her for tipping me off to the bracing harpsichord music of Scarlatti, which was a welcome new one on me.
