22 February 2012
News
For over
forty years, virtuoso saxophonist/composer Barbara Thompson has been
Britain's most brilliant and best-known female jazz musician. She has released many albums and toured regularly
throughout Europe, mainly with her own band Paraphernalia. But in 1997,
the same year that she received an MBE for her services to music, Barbara was diagnosed with Parkinson's
Playing
Against Time is a feature-length documentary about Barbara's inspiring
and creative struggle with Parkinson's. Funded by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, the film has
been made at intervals across a period of five years, beginning in 2005
with Barbara still performing with Paraphernalia on a 'farewell'
European tour. After which, apart from one remarkable filmed appearance
with her band at Ronnie Scott's in London in 2008, Barbara has put most of her
carefully-managed energies into writing music for others to play.
Encouraged
and supported by her husband, the virtuoso jazz-rock drummer Jon
Hiseman, the film follows her progress during this period, interweaving
medical and musical sequences as she struggles to sustain an active
musical life, while seeking out and investigating new drugs and
treatments for a disease for which a cure seems tantalisingly close. The
film has been made with the full co-operation and participation of
Barbara and Jon, both of whom talk about their experience with eloquence
and humour. It also includes several sequences showing Barbara at the height
of her powers from Jazz, Rock and Marriage, an earlier documentary
about Barbara and her husband, made by Mike Dibb for BBC2 in 1979.
Playing
Against Time is an unusual and enlightening exploration of Parkinson's
as seen through music, and about the increasing importance of
music and rhythm in our neurological understanding and treatment of this
and other degenerative diseases. The film includes important medical
contributions from Professor Ray Chaudhuri, Barbara's specialist
consultant and a major authority on the disease, and Professor Tipu Aziz,
a leading authority on deep brain stimulation.
Early in 2010, after long delays caused by NHS funding
problems, Barbara was at last fitted with an apomorphine® pump which has enabled her to control her condition to the
extent of allowing her (at least for a while) to return to the European
stage. Playing Against Time thus ends on a cautiously optimistic note,
with Barbara appearing with her husband Jon's veteran rock band
Colosseum in an open air venue in Vienna, where she triumphantly belts
out saxophone solos to a hugely enthusiastic audience.
