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Sound sensations

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

The Archive Hour (BBC Radio Four); Jazz Library (BBC Radio Three)

Baggini played a montage of sounds that he thought had once been so important that we would all still know them instantly. A kettle boiling, milk bottles rattling, a needle being dropped on to a record. He then went on to ponder what’s going to happen to the collective sound archive now that we have all become so individualised, living in an aural bubble with our own personalised phone ringtones, iPod playlists and wireless schedules. The only memory we are likely to have in common is a computerised female saying, ‘The number you have dialled has not been recognised.’

Baggini used his programme to indulge his love of old radio comedies, especially Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers, which rather took us away from his philosophical meanderings. But at least it meant we were given ‘Gateway to Balham’ and ‘The East Cheam Cultural and Progressive Society’, both of which were recorded years before Baggini was born, and yet they found their way to his tape recorder in the 1970s (by way of Radio Four repeats), the comic observation so sharp that they gained a new teenage audience.

By chance last week several programmes played tantalising snippets of tracks by a female singer who each time was described as the best jazz singer of the last few decades (she died in 1998, aged 69) — but I’d never even heard of her. By even more mysterious chance Saturday’s edition of Jazz Library (Radio Three) was dedicated to her. I’m talking about Betty Carter, whose extraordinary voice and musical technique is like no other. We had 60 minutes of her music, usefully analysed for jazz novices like me by Alyn Shipton with his guest Christine Tobin, this year’s Best Vocalist in the BBC Jazz Awards.

I’ve never before understood the appeal of skat, which can so often veer into caterwauling, but Betty Carter had such control and such musicality she never sounded shrill, or fussed us with too many grace notes. She leaves you wanting more from each song, whether a sultry version of Judy Garland’s ‘The Trolley Song’ from 1979 or the melancholic ‘Spring can really hang you up the most’.

Shipton told us she was ‘a relentless experimenter’ and then played us a version of ‘My Favourite Things’ from 1964, sung at breakneck speed and with the most incredible ending, Carter holding the note so long and with such dynamic power that I’ll never be able to sing ‘Raindrops on roses’ in the bath again.