Blue Notes

I'm a senior producer in BBC Wales whose life is spent in, let's face it, musical heaven. I make programmes about music for Radio 4 and one of my greatest sources of pride over the last seven years has been to produce Ken Clarke's Jazz Greats, a very welcome by-product of which has been to introduce me to a genre of music I wouldn't have lowered myself to listening to whilst doing a music degree in the mid 70s.

In fact the 'J' word didn't darken my world for another 20 or so years when, covering for another producer who'd gone sick (I wonder why), I had to interview Ken Clarke about his favourite saxophone players. With a mind on who he was and my total indifference and ignorance of the subject, mental images of the former chancellor with all guns blazing at the despatch box or on the Today programme raced through my mind along with lambs to the slaughter and yours truly being roasted on a spit! "A word for level Mr Clarke?" and we're off, or at least he was off.

I still have this image of him leaning back in his chair, jacket off, cigar and mug of coffee on the table with the Palace of Westminster as a backdrop, just talking and talking and talking about jazz. Correction, not talking... it was more a stream of consciousness flooding out of him with a passion that sometimes eludes 'expert' interviewees. It was as if he had been waiting all day for someone, anyone, to turn up and ask him about jazz!

Interview, or rather monologue in the can, I broached the subject of getting him to do something on Radio 4 with the commissioner of music programmes. I'd barely finished the sentence before he exclaimed YES! And then after the first series, four more please... and then, four more again! And they kept calling for more and more which is where we are at with Ken's seventh series of Jazz Greats this Tuesday at 1.30pm on Radio 4.

After that first series I got a message from his assistant, another stranger to jazz, to say that at last she understood and appreciated what Ken had been going on about for all those years... and she liked it! The response we get from people like her, who come to jazz as a result of listening to Ken, is something I am particularly proud of, even more so in that jazz aficionados also welcome his contribution with open ears. So how do we 'can' Ken's enthusiasm and knowledge into a half hour package? His diary is, to say the least, pretty full, particularly at the moment.

Yet for each interview recording session (that's around 90 minutes per programme), he is totally absorbed in jazz. He brings with him a formidable knowledge, and as you'd expect, does not hold back on personal likes and dislikes: it's highly doubtful he will have a CD of Fats Waller playing the organ in his car (17 March), but his interviewees do fight back. In fact on 10 March he even concedes (maybe just a millimetre) to saxophonist Soweto Kinch that when the great Charlie Parker debased himself by playing with a string orchestra, Parker's contribution wasn't too bad.

And yes, thanks to Ken Clarke my CD shelves buckle under the weight of all the music I was too proud to listen to as a music student, and the 'J' word really does figure heavily in my life. Why not try it?

If you're a Twitter user you might want to join in with a little experiment we're trying this week called Good Radio Club. The idea is to use Twitter to get a conversation going about Ken's programme while it's on air. To join in, listen to the live edition of the show (this won't work with listen again!) and Twitter your thoughts about it to the world, then make sure you include this 'hash tag' in every tweet you send: #goodradioclub - we'll pick up your tweets and include them in the conversation for others to read. Learn more about this at the Good Radio Club web site.

Paul Evans is the producer of Ken Clarke's Jazz Greats on Radio 4.