Super human

‘We think we’re in charge of this stuff but we’re not,’ said Quincy Jones, the composer, arranger, jazz trumpeter, musical genius. He was talking to Julian Joseph at the Montreux Jazz Festival for Jazz Line-Up on Radio 3 (Saturday). ‘It’s divine intervention.’

Jones, who masterminded Michael Jackson’s Thriller as well as countless other hits, film scores (including The Italian Job and The Color Purple) and his own ‘Soul Bossa Nova’, was remarkably sanguine about his extraordinary career. His enormous self-confidence was there from the start. Finding himself in Paris in the 1950s touring with a big band, he decided to stay on so that he could study with Nadia Boulanger and learn how to write for a symphony orchestra. ‘You have to master your skill,’ he said.

On Monday night, the Prom at the Albert Hall will be devoted to his music, the walls ringing out to jazz classics, funk and pop from the Metropole Orkest, in recognition of Jones’s ability to criss-cross musical genres. How does he manage to exist in so many different musical worlds? ‘Your music will never be more or less than what you are as a human being,’ Jones replied, in which case he must be some human.

‘They are bodily representations of mortality,’ said Marie-Louise Muir about the keening songs which used to be sung by women in Ireland during the three-day wakes held at the homes of those who had died, the coffin lying open for all to see. The keeners were paid to come and sing, professionals who made money out of their ability to express grief in song. In Songs for the Dead on Radio 4 (Tuesday), Muir went to Inis Mór, off the west coast of Ireland, to visit women who still remembered the sound of real keening.