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| 100 Years Of Tommy Dorsey | ...ALYN SHIPTON celebrates the centenary of the 'Sentimental Gentleman of Swing'. He is joined by trumpeter Zeke Zarchy and drummer Louie Bellson who look back at their time in the Dorsey band.... |
| Aloft On Easterly Winds | ...ALYN SHIPTON takes to the BRISTOL Downs to talk to fliers, oriental historians and the poet Seamus Heaney about history of the kite.... |
| Archive Hour, The | ...ALYN SHIPTON plays musical gems from the BBC arcHIVes which illustrate the development of British jazz during the 1930s and 40s.... |
| Blues To Be There | ...The Newport Jazz Festival is 50 years old this year. ALYN SHIPTON presents three programmes telling the story of this Rhode Island institution.... |
| Body And Soul | ...ALYN SHIPTON presents a three-part profile of the American tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, who was born 100 years ago this month. Hawkins was the first musician to turn the saxophone from a novelty instrument to a powerful jazz solo vehicle and he became one of the most influential soloists of the swing era.... |
| Devil's Architect? | ...ALYN SHIPTON delves behind the dark theories and occult speculation that surround the churches of architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736), to reveal the symbolism and imagery at work in his buildings. Hawksmoor has always been a controversial figure. His flamboyant and dramatic buildings were often criticised by his more conservative contemporaries for breaking the rules and transgressing the boundaries of good taste. His unique personal style fused ideas from classical Greece, Rome and Egypt with a very arresting concern with mass and sensory impact. His London churches, especially, are almost modern in appearance and it's only in the last fifty years that the sheer scale of Hawksmoor's genius has come to be fully appreciated. After years of neglect, many of these buildings are now undergoing extensive renovation and restoration. It seems his time has finally arrived, but his work still provokes fierce debate. His churches are now controversial for a darker reason. The writer Iain Sinclair, in his poetic essay Lud Heat, demonstrated mysterious alignments between the Hawksmoor churches: lines of power which set up occult influences across London. He develops the idea of the Hawksmoor churches as centres for dark and malign powers, and draws parallels between the buildings and a series of grisly ritual murders across the east-end. These metaphorical, literary ideas were then given further currency through the novel 'Hawksmoor' by Peter Ackroyd, which expanded on Sinclair's themes. ALYN SHIPTON explores these modern myths with Iain Sinclair and investigates how the academic establishment view these theories.... |
| Discovering Music | ...THISWEEKAs part of the 2009 London Jazz Festival, ALYN SHIPTON presents a special programme from the BBC Radio Theatre exploring two remarkable but very different 'classical' clarinet concertos which were composed for the great jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman: works by Malcolm Arnold and Aaron Copland. Alyn chooses tracks from Goodman's extensive jazz discography to illustrate some of the focal points in the concertos, while the two pieces are bought to life with the help of soloist Julian Bliss and the Trinity College of Music Chamber Orchestra conducted by Andrew Gourlay.... |
| Django's People | ...To mark this year's 50th anniversary of the death of the great gipsy guitarist, Django Reinhardt, ALYN SHIPTON goes in search of the itinerant Manouche gipsies among whom Django grew up. Is it still possible to trace the musical roots of Reinhardt's style? Among families in the gipsy settlements of Holland and Belgium, strong musical traditions are still handed down from father to son, while in Paris the urban descendents of Django mix new influences with jazz and gipsy music to keep the legacy alive.... |
| Grand Union At 25 | ...ALYN SHIPTON explores 25 years of the Grand Union Orchestra, in conversation with founder and director Tony Haynes, and with contributions from trumpeter Claude Deppa and sitar player Baluji Shrivastav... |
| Grand Union Orchestra | ...In conversation with founder and director Tony Haynes, ALYN SHIPTON explores the work of this innovative and cross-cultural group of musicians, now in its 25th year. Contributors include trumpeter Claude Deppa and sitar player Baluji Shrivastav.... |
| He Who Pays The Piper | ...ALYN SHIPTON traces the history of music publishing.... |
| Home To Harlem, The | ...ALYN SHIPTON investigates the period between World War I and the Depression when Harlem was the black capital of America, attracting musicians, writers, artists and intellectuals including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Richard Bruce Nugent.... |
| Home To Harlem | ...ALYN SHIPTON investigates the Harlem Renaissance - the period between World War I and the Depression - when Harlem was the black capital of America... |
| In The Name Of The Fatha - The Great Earl Hines | ...ALYN SHIPTON explores the career of the pianist who revolutionised piano jazz in the 1920s, Earl 'Father' Hines.... |
| Jazz File | ...Jazz File is the documentary strand of Radio 3's jazz programming. It covers aspects of jazz in-depth, presented by voices familiar to the network including Jez Nelson, ALYN SHIPTON and Brian Morton.... |
| Jazz Library | ...American singer Sheila Jordan joins ALYN SHIPTON in front of an audience at the Gateshead International Jazz Festival 2009 to select the highlights from her half-century as arguably one of the most adventurous and individual singers in jazz. The programme features her minimal settings and explorations of timbre and timing, from her 1960s classic Portrait of Sheila to her most recent recordings.... |
| Kid From Red Bank, The | ...In the second of four programmes on the legendary pianist and band leader William `Count' Basie, ALYN SHIPTON traces the Basie band's progress to New York via Chicago, where they opened at the Roseland Ballroom in January 1937. Harry `Sweets' Edison and Buddy Tate share memories of the great saxophonist Lester Young, and Al Grey recalls the impact of the band's singer `Mr Five-by-five' Jimmy Rushing.... |
| Lullaby Of Birdland - The George Shearing Story | ...George Shearing talks to ALYN SHIPTON about at his long and distinguished career in music.... |
| Mesmerism And Hypnosis | ...Through Dr Miracle's HYPNOSIS of Antonia in Tales of Hoffman, Offenbach was cashing in on a wave of interest in HYPNOSIS in the 19th century, created by the ENGLISH doctor James Braid, who coined the term hypnotism during his experiments on the work of Dr Franz Mesmer. ALYN SHIPTON explores the vogue for stage presentation of hypnotism during the Victorian Era with the authors, Daniel Pick and Alison Winter and goes under the influence of the hypnotist, Paul McKenna to explore the effect of hypnotism on the conscious and unconscious mind.... |
| Never Let Me Go - The Musical World Of Keith Jarrett | ...ALYN SHIPTON begins a series of conversations with pianist and composer Keith Jarrett, who celebrates his 60th birthday May 8th 2005.... |
| Performance On 3 | ...ALYN SHIPTON introduces a concert by a big band co-led by trumpeter Jon Faddis and bassist John Lee, celebrating the music and spirit of the great trumpeter and bebop innovator Dizzy Gillespie, who died in 1993. The stellar line-up includes trombonist Slide Hampton, and saxophonists Jimmy Heath, James Moody and Frank Wess. Recorded at the Barbican in LONDON earlier this month.... |
| Playing Bony's Tune | ...ALYN SHIPTON explores the changing sounds, styles and functions of music from the eve of the French Revolution to the fall of Napoleon.... |
| Poisoned Angel - The Story Of Alma Rose | ...ALYN SHIPTON looks at the life of Alma Rosé and investigates the justification for her character assassination. He speaks with those who played under her baton in Auschwitz-Birkenau, three remarkable survivors of the Nazi death camp. Alma Rosé was musical "royalty". Niece of Gustav Mahler, at the time director of the Vienna Opera, and the daughter of Arnold Rosé, concertmaster of the Opera Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic and leader of his own renowned string quartet. With the annexation of Austria, Alma's family fled the country. Alma mistakenly thought she was protected by her Czech passport gained through marriage. She was betrayed, arrested, and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Shortly after her arrival, in a grotesque replay of her past, she was asked to take over a poor, threadbare musical ensemble of women inmates which she did with uncompromising zeal, driving herself and her musicians to exhaustion. Gaining unprecedented stature and exploiting some of the most brutal camp functionaries' love of music, she saved her musicians from the gas chambers. Perhaps surprisingly in a camp which had already murdered over a million people, conspiracy theories abound on the cause of her death at Birkenau. Was she poisoned by the SS or even fellow prisoners?... |
| Purcell And Dryden - A Professional Friendship | ...ALYN SHIPTON explores Dryden and Purcell's collaboration on the semi-opera King Arthur, a work which is often regarded as the first professional collaboration between librettist and composer. He is joined by Purcell biographer Jonathan Keates, who describes some of the sights, sounds and smell of the world of Restoration theatre. It was a period in which people would come in and out for single acts of an opera, jostle in the stalls and swap seats in boxes, while the privileged would claim seats on the stage.... |
| Sex, Drugs And Four Minutes Of Silence | ...ALYN SHIPTON looks back on the time when composers' rule books were torn up and John Cage's infamous `4'33', in which a pianist sits on stage for that time in total silence, led the way to a brief, ground-breaking period when classical music was the most radical of the arts.... |
| Summoned By Bells [documentary] | ...ALYN SHIPTON explores how bells were used in past centuries to indicate everything from prayer to mealtimes, the curfew hour, or a death in the community - in fact to reflect the human experience from cradle to grave.... |
| Swing At The Bbc | ...ALYN SHIPTON plays musical gems from the BBC archives which illustrate the development of British jazz during the 1930s and 40s.... |
| To Sing Like Bing | ...ALYN SHIPTON traces the career of master crooner Bing Crosby.... |
| Unlikely Friendship, An | ...Haydn and Nelson. ALYN SHIPTON looks at the unexpected friendship between the composer and the naval hero.... |