John Harle
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 1998
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the most-recorded saxophonist in the world. Inspired by Duke Ellington and encouraged by Jack Brymer, John Harle is equally at home playing jazz or classical music. He once marched with the Coldstream Guards, but left to test himself against other musicians at the Royal College of Music, gaining 100% in his final exam. As a composer he has collaborated with among others, Paul McCartney and Harrison Birtwistle, and his first opera is premiered this week.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Hunting Song by Pentangle Book: The Aesthetics of Music by Roger Scruton Luxury: Lute and strings
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:09.1 | The program was originally broadcast in 1998, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is a saxophonist. He is in fact the most recorded saxophonist in the world, equally at home and equally acclaimed as both a classical virtuoso and a jazz improviser. |
| 0:42.0 | He's composed concert works, film and television scores and |
| 0:45.0 | made 15 solo albums. His terror and magnificence went to number three in the |
| 0:49.4 | classical charts. He started his career as a musician in the Cold Stream Guards, won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, and moved quickly into the career that's made him an international celebrity. |
| 1:00.0 | He's collaborated with many of the greats from Bert whistle to McCartney and at the moment is writing the music for the BBC's Millennium Production, The History of Britain. |
| 1:09.0 | The saxophone, he says, is a direct representation of how you're feeling. He is John Har. Do you mean when you say that, |
| 1:17.0 | John, that the saxophone is very close to the singing voice? |
| 1:21.0 | It's not only very close to the singing voice? It's not only very close to the singing voice. It actually uses |
| 1:25.3 | the with the exception of the vocal chords. It uses the same bodily systems. The diaphragm |
| 1:32.3 | and the lungs all fulfilling, exactly the same function. |
| 1:35.4 | So you're blowing your whole character and personality down into the area? |
| 1:38.9 | I think it does work like that. |
| 1:40.6 | And when you growl, it growls exactly when you cry it cries that's true |
| 1:47.1 | it's it's it's a peculiar sensation but I do remember moving from the clarinet to the saxophone and feeling an amazing sense of relief and of freedom because the saxophone offered this breadth and this variety of expression that I just had no idea that I was capable of. |
| 2:05.7 | How would you define the noise you make through it then? |
| 2:10.1 | What's the personality that's coming through when you play it? |
| 2:13.0 | What I strive for is a kind of purity and a purity of line and a purity of sound |
| 2:22.0 | that is, I suppose, unusual in saxophonists most saxophonists tend |
| 2:26.9 | towards quite a gruff sound especially in jazz although I do play in a jazz, although I do play in a jazz environment quite a lot of the time. |
| 2:36.4 | My main background is contemporary classical and it's the idea of, I suppose, the purity of classical line in a jazz environment or sometimes |
... |
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