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Jazz on 3 - Ornette Coleman tribute

2015-06-19T16:32:37+00:00

Ornette Coleman

Jez Nelson previews this week’s Jazz on 3, paying tribute to saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman

Time after time jazz musicians talk about the quest to find their own voice. It seems to me that Ornette Coleman found his at an early age and it was one of the most recognisable in this beautiful music’s history. Ornette's blues-drenched, heart-stopping alto call was as close to the cry of the human soul as any horn player ever got. From the seismic recordings of his late 50s quartet through to his last recorded works (the subject of litigation to his final days) his sound was recognisable within a phrase.

I think that's why he touched so many and is being mourned so deeply. It matters little whether you ever got to grips with his harmolodics theory, because like John Coltrane, James Brown and Aretha Franklin, Ornette Coleman could floor you with a few notes.

On this week’s programme we hear from some of those who were close to Ornette or whose lives and music were touched by him. The singer Neneh Cherry (find clip below) talks movingly about her childhood memories of a dazzlingly dressed man who was a guru to her stepfather Don: and pianist Paul Bley (find clip below), now in his 80s, laughs hysterically as he describes being left irrelevant in his own band by the quartet that would soon record The Shape of Jazz To Come running musical rings around him. And bass player Jamaaladeen Tacuma describes how Ornette bottled the sound of a bustling New York into the super-tight funk of his superb Prime Time band.

'They were very much a unit... brothers...' Singer Neneh Cherry recalls her stepfather Don's relationship with Ornette Coleman

'You got it? Got it? I had never had it..!' Pianist, Paul Bley remembers playing with Ornette Coleman.

My guest, Guardian writer John Fordham, tells us how he nearly walked out of his first Ornette gig in Manchester in the 60s - baffled by Ornette's attack on violin, trumpet and alto. He wasn't alone - the jazz world was shocked and even offended. But John stayed and Ornette won him, and eventually generations of music fans, over. He never changed but we learned to listen and to realise we were hearing something natural and important. The Shape of Jazz to Come indeed.

It would be impossible to get even close to summing up Ornette's 60-year career in 90 minutes but I hope you'll enjoy listening to this week’s Jazz on 3 as much as producer Chris Elcombe and I enjoyed putting it together. There's much love for Ornette and his voice will be with us forever.

Jazz on 3

Ornette Coleman

Copenhagen - The director's blog

2013-01-10T13:19:19+00:00

Simon Russell Beale, Greta Scacchi and Benedict Cumberbatch in studio

Emma Harding has produced and directed Michael Frayn's play about the controversial meeting in 1941 between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, friends who now found themselves on opposing sides in Hitler's war. Here, Emma describes the concept and the casting ...

I set out to direct Michael Frayn's Copenhagen for radio with great joy - I'd hugely admired Michael Blakemore's original 1998 stage production and Howard Davies' inventive 2002 BBC film version - but also with a great sense of trepidation. How would we turn a brilliant stage play into something that worked as a radio drama? How would I help the actors - and the listeners - navigate some very complex scientific and moral ideas?

But as I read and re-read the play, I began to feel that one of the keys to the piece was Frayn's playful and metaphorical use of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The notion of uncertainty runs through the whole drama - the uncertainty and the unsaid within human relationships, the uncertainty and the contradiction of human memory, and the uncertainty - the unknowability - of human motivation. And, in the foreground, is the still unresolved mystery of why Heisenberg went to see Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941.

But a drama about the uncertainty of a character's motivation presents an interesting dilemma to actors and director, who are more used to asking 'why am I doing what I'm doing?' and making a decision one way or another. Fortunately, I had a terrifically bright and engaged cast - Simon Russell Beale, Benedict Cumberbatch and Greta Scacchi - who were more than capable of taking on these mind games.

It's also critical that the actors are confident with the complex scientific ideas that their characters are throwing around the dinner table. I invited the physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili along to our read-through, so that the cast could ask him detailed questions about Bohr and Heisenberg's work. As anyone who's listened to Radio 4's The Life Scientific

will know, Jim's a brilliant expositor of mind-bending ideas, so by the end of the session, we all felt we had some sort of grip on the science that informs the drama.

But the play itself isn't about science. Or rather, it is about science, but it's about science in the context of morality, politics and history. These two physicists are working on opposing sides in a global war and they are both very aware of the potential chain reaction - that their work on the atom could inevitably contribute to the deaths of millions of people.

These are big ideas. But Copenhagen is also an intimate, domestic drama about a friendship between two men and a perceived betrayal.

In Simon and Benedict's portrayals of Bohr and Heisenberg, we worked on creating a real sense of a friendship that has become strained, but that was once incredibly close - the friendship between an eminent physicist and his mercury-witted protégé, or between a father-figure and his adopted son. And Greta, as Margrethe Bohr, presents a fiercely intelligent woman, torn between her inherent instinct towards graciousness and hospitality, and her irritation with Heisenberg.