At the Window
Anne Karpf
The Guardian, 6 March 1999
Trust the gifted Alan Hall and Piers Plowright to begin a radio feature about a musician with a woman identifying some people in a photograph, thereby challenging the eternal, assumed list of What Doesn't Work On Radio Radio — ballet, mime, and photography. Their Radio 3 programme. At the Window, about the Chicago jazz pianist Jimmy Yancey, delightfully dispensed with the cliched ways in which music and speech usually consort together on the radio. You'd expect a feature about a jazz musician to start with some blowsy, bluesy music, segueing into someone remembering him — that, or the recollection first with music trickling behind it. Ergo, theirs didn't. It began instead with the photo sequence, followed by the seemingly endless sound of the Chicago city trains, so that we instantly pictured Yancey in a heavily urban, run-down setting. Those opening moments were strikingly music- free, making the music — when it finally arrived — a voice in itself.
Plowright and Hall also used the interviews in a fresh way, cutting together two different, but complementary descriptions of Yancey's old piano. Then suddenly we were in a baseball sequence: it wasn't until this neared its end that we learned that Yancey had been a groundsman at a baseball stadium. In the radio-documentary book of high crimes and misdemeanours , leavintg listeners in the dark for more than 1.26 seconds leads to serious audience fidgets and, if repeated, the certainty that they will switch off. You give information first, then illustrate it, so the convention insists.
Finally, Hall and Plowright had a woman talking about how Yancey's music "gets into the core of your gut". Cue gutsy, blowsy music? Nope. Cue train sounds again, then
a chap saying "At the window" then, slowly, cracklingly, the music. The feature ended with a fellow asking what the music was saying and replying "I don't know". Since we'd learned that Yancey used to end his music in an odd, unresolved gesture, this was delightfully apt.
But while At The Window was a splendid hearing aid, was it experimental? I ask not out of pedantry, but because it was part of Radio 3's Between The Ears series — supposed to generate radio innovation. Experimental is a relative notion, and one can't help but feel that there's been a touch of goal-post-moving at the BBC, where anything remotely untraditional must now be caged in labelled slots like a dangerous animal.
