Culture Zone - An A-Z of Jazz

The Culture Zone is celebrating the 2010 Glasgow Jazz Festival with a romp through our own particular A-Z of Jazz. It's been quite a challenge to find a suitable entry for each of the 26 letters but we think we've managed it without too many factual inaccuracies. We've been trawling the BBC Radio Scotland archives to bring together a mix of classic documentaries and one-to-one interviews plus many of the greatest anthems from the Jazz age but some letters have proved harder than others. Of course there can only be one 'A', that being Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis is hard to beat when it comes to the letter 'D' but what about 'Q', 'X' and 'Z'?

Luckily with a broad remit to cover the whole genre of Jazz, we were able to bend the rules slightly. For example 'I' became Indian Jazz and a chance to branch out into the outer realms of World Jazz fusion with a track from Indian drummer Trilok Gurtu. 'Q' was simple enough, as one of the performers at this year's Glasgow Jazz Festival, Ryan Quigley, popped in to the Jazz House recently and you can hear that interview in the Zone. The other big cheat was 'X'. In our case 'X' stood for xylophone and the master of that instrument Lionel Hampton. However, as any self-respecting Jazz fan will tell you, Lionel Hampton's instrument of choice was the vibraphone - the Jazz cousin of the xylophone!

So, with a few apologies for a lack of strictness - which in its own way is quite 'free jazz' - we present a 26 letter stroll through the jazz alphabet. Check it out and if you think you've got better suggestions for each of the letters then let us know!

The Culture Zone - An A-Z of Jazz is available to listen to from 25th June 2010 for 14 days.