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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Bebop

Composer of the Week: Bebop: Episode 4

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Episode 4

Bebop

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Bebop, Episode 4

Donald Macleod on bebop's two most influential pianists - Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk.

Donald Macleod and Geoffrey Smith focus on bebop's two most influential pianists: Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk. They became lifelong friends after meeting in the early 1940s.

Bebop! It's a rather silly word for a crucial chapter in jazz history. It didn't just come out of nowhere but evolved, fizzed and bubbled into existence in the USA in the early 1940s, as a result of a gloriously rich and complex musical chemistry involving different combinations of musicians, styles and places. All week, Donald Macleod and his special guest, the writer and broadcaster Geoffrey Smith, have some serious fun investigating this amazing musical phenomenon.

Thursday's programme homes in on the 88 keys of the piano, under the phenomenal fingers of Bebop's two most influential pianists: Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk. The classically-trained Powell had a ferociously virtuosic style of playing. His personality, though, was shy and introverted, and there was something almost helpless about him. He had a tendency to drink to excess, and a formidable knack for getting into trouble. In 1945 he was beaten senseless by the Philadelphia police, an attack whose savagery left him with mental problems that dogged him for the rest of his all-too-brief life; he died in 1966, a couple of months short of his 42nd birthday. Powell and Monk met at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where Monk was house pianist in the early '40s, and they remained firm friends. We hear Monk's tribute to Powell, 'In Walked Bud', and Powell's reading of a Monk composition, 'Off Minor'. We also hear their very different readings of 'Tea for Two' - Powell's a wildly inventive hectic dash, like something from the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, Monk's much more spacious and angular. And to finish: 'Wee' from a celebrated live concert recording in which Powell played with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and Max Roach; and a Monk tune, 'Little Rootie Tootie', in a magnificent arrangement for big band.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod and special guest Geoffrey Smith explore the jazz mode of bebop

Donald Macleod is joined by writer and broadcaster Geoffrey Smith to explore the jazz mode of bebop. It emerged in the 1940s, out of different combinations of musicians, styles and places

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