Conducting: Next Stop the Jazz Maestro?

Celebs may try baton-waving coordination on TV's Maestro, but let's compare how jazz legends conduct themselves and their orchestras...

As the Guardian's media columns reported yesterday, the BBC2 show Maestro (in which eight celebrities, including former Blur star Alex James, DJ/producer Goldie and TV presenters Peter Snow and Katie Derham competed for the chance to conduct the BBC Concert Orchestra on a Prom concert) pulled a 1.7 million audience for its opening episode this week.

Like all celeb-reality shows, the attraction wasn't so much in the theme, as in the chance to spy on people used to making difficult things look easy being forced into a difficult thing that's way out of their depth.

Will they cry, or stamp, or flirt their way out of it? Will they be visibly, embarrassingly, unable to handle the gap between being Leonard Bernstein in front of their bedroom mirrors, but on the podium a helplessly flapping marionette who can't stop the band's tempo sagging through the floor? Or will the biggest musical ignoramus of the lot turn out to be an undiscovered conducting genius?

Maestro was irresistible for those kinds of reasons, but it was also fascinating from a jazzer's angle. One of the lessons the prospective conductors received was in the scratch-your-head-and-rub-your-belly art of maintaining the pulse with one hand, and eliciting emotional expressiveness from different sections of the orchestra with the other. It made me think of a lot of great jazz orchestras I'd heard over the years - all of them right in the pocket with the beat, but full of dynamic surprises and emotional intensity too - from those of Duke Ellington to Gil Evans, to Mike Gibbs or Maria Schneider. Jazz bands, even big ones, have hardly ever used conductors - and in some quarters, the idea of such a dictatorial figure is almost regarded as an insult to the music's freewheeling spirit.

Ellington didn't conduct his legendary band at all, but often used his spare and prodding piano figures as a conducting tool, coupled with plenty of traditional maestro's eye-contact and body-speak. Gil Evans, one of the most deceptively indolent bandleaders in jazz history, used to wander among his musicians as they played, and occasionally shift the mood with a stab at a keyboard as he slouched past it, or the odd shrug and minimalist wave. Mike Gibbs and Maria Schneider conduct - the latter as if she were dancing a ballet - but their role is to guide the textures and intensities of the non-improvised parts, the timekeeping job being down to drummers who know how to stretch it whilst holding it tight.

In a far less sectarian jazz era today, the presence of a conductor on a jazz show is quite properly no longer regarded as a sign that a favourite jazz caricature - of the hierarchical, top-down western-classical pecking-order - is taking over the people's music. The common elements in all musical genres, rather than the differences, are being increasingly well understood - and Maestro has now been added to the reasons why. But I'd love to see an equivalent show in which a group of celebs who've occasionally scribbled the odd ditty in their spare time are given a wilful, improvisationally-ingenious jazz band to help them turn their bath-time whistlings into a full-blown jazz piece. Given the right stars, it might be just as popular - and a revelation to many about just how the casually expert practitioners of this spontaneous and mercurial music really work their magic.