Radio Listener with Jim Gilchrist

Those who remember Dudley Moore as the wee comedian who generated a droll repartee with Peter Cook in Not Only But Also, back in the Sixties, not to mention that tangle with Bo Derek to the strains of Ravel’s Bolero, tend to forget that he didn’t always play for laughs.

Moore, who died in 2002, was also an accomplished jazz pianist and composer. In DUDLEY MOORE’S WORLD OF JAZZ, former members of his Dudley Moore Trio – Chris Karan, Pete Morgan and Barbara Moore – are joined by jazz diva Dame Cleo Laine, rock keyboardist Keith Emerson and pianist and Radio 2 jazz presenter Jamie Cullum to recall his music, the humour that informed his playing as much as his comedy roles, and the disability that blighted his early life and left psychological scars.

Music of a different kind, but which has permeated concert hall and cinema screen, is celebrated in Radio 3’s COMPOSER OF THE WEEK – PHILIP GLASS, when Donald Macleod examines the work of the influential New York minimalist who, among other things, worked as a plumber and drove a taxi to support himself during his music studies. In recent years preferring to describe himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures”, Glass went on to write such influential pieces as hypnotically circular works for solo piano and string quartet, operas such as Einstein on the Beach and collaborations with the likes of David Bowie and Brian Eno, as well as scores for films such as Kundun and the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy reprised at last year’s Edinburgh International Festival. He is almost certainly the world’s most widely performed taxi driver.

Over on Radio Scotland, Clare English presents the penultimate programme in her series TALES OF THE UNEXPlained, in which she meets David Cunningham, a faith healer who claims to have helped many seriously ill people over the past 20 years, including such celebrities as Hayley Mills, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.

Mind over matter, placebo effect or, as Cunningham insists, something more?

DUDLEY MOORE’S WORLD OF JAZZ

Monday, Radio 2, 10pm

composer of the week: philip glass

Mon-Fri, Radio 3, 12pm

tales of the unexplained

Thursday, Radio Scotland, 2:05pm