Radio 3 is right to expand its musical range

SIR – David Bryant (Letters, November 14) says jazz does not sit well with Radio 3’s classical output.

Should Radio 3 be limited to “classical” music? What is covered by this term? It cannot surely be limited to old music.

Jazz can be complex and serious. It is played by outrageously talented musicians and sung by some of our greatest singers. Cleo Laine, a jazz vocalist, has a husky contralto voice, with an unmatched vocal range in excess of three octaves, together with innovative versatility.

Serious jazz is not regularly played on any other BBC radio station. Only one commercial station does this. Radio 3 has every justification for expanding its range.

John Hanson

Canterbury, Kent

SIR – I have more than 70 gigabytes of music on my ipod, but this collection consists of only two genres: the chamber music of the 19th-century Romantics (Schumann, Brahms etc), and jazz.

The boundary between classical music and jazz has often been blurred – for example, Duke Ellington was influenced by Béla Bartók – so I think it perfectly acceptable for Radio 3 to play jazz.

Martin Henry

Good Easter, Essex

SIR – The BBC’S pop, jazz, class and youth-obsessed ideology has indeed ruined Radio 3.

I was an avid Radio 3 listener as a child growing up in a working-class South Yorkshire home in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did I revel in 900 years of music, but I also delighted in the beautifully modulated RP of announcers such as Cormac Rigby, Tom Crowe and Patricia Hughes, whose concise, well-informed and opinion-free introductions were almost as musical as the works they preceded.

Fifty years ago the BBC gave me access to the products of the finest minds of every era. Today the only mind the BBC wants me to access is its own.

John Sheridan Smith

Southampton