Five jazz musicians take on Radiohead's Nude

We asked modern jazzers to record their own take on Radiohead's Nude - the way the greats once did with the pop hits of the day. John Fordham hears how it went
Radiohead's Thom Yorke performing at Glastonbury 2003
We asked some jazz musicians to tackle Radiohead. Photograph: PA

'Things, the Street, blues," the great Chicago saxophonist Johnny Griffin used to mutter to the total strangers of the new rhythm section he would encounter each night as he travelled the world's jazz clubs with his sax. That cryptic sentence was shorthand for the three standard songs My Favourite Things, Green Dolphin Street and that eternally fruitful jazz vehicle, the 12-bar blues. Wherever he went, Griffin could trust the house bands playing with him to know those songs and many others - not just their melodies, but their underlying harmonies, too, allowing the musicians to improvise new melodies off the song, in real time, all night.

Any interpretation should respect the original's essence while stamping it with the character of its performer. The difference in jazz is that the interpretation may stray so far that the original tune becomes unrecognisable. Master improviser Sonny Rollins, for instance, will unleash a torrent of variations that twist and embellish the original, segue into a random run of other famous melodies, or transform into on-the-fly miniatures that are sometimes more striking than the classic he started out with.

The great 1920s and 30s songs of the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen or Rodgers and Hart were the pop music of their day. Their pop currency has long since faded, but those poignant themes, seductive harmonies and audacious key-shifts continue to fascinate improvisers; music college jazz courses still teach standards as part of the survival kit. Latterly, jazz originals have become standards, too - Thelonious Monk's Round Midnight, or Dizzy Gillespie's A Night in Tunisia, say. Rock and pop have followed: Herbie Hancock included the Beatles' Norwegian Wood on his 1995 album The New Standard; pianist Brad Mehldau has applied his mix of improv and classical recitalist's skills to the music of Radiohead.

It is to Radiohead we turned for this one-off experiment: inviting a selection of musicians to cover the same song to see how their interpretations would differ - you can hear the results at Radiohead generously allowed us to use one of their numbers, and we chose the haunting and elusive Nude, from their most recent album, In Rainbows. Below, the musicians involved explain how they approached the task (click on their names to hear the music):

Nathaniel Facey (Empirical)

I'd not heard the track until the night before the recording. Lewis Wright and I transcribed it, then we all played it in the studio as a group collaboration. Miles Davis would sometimes play a standard with just hints of the original melody, but you'd still know what it was. We used that approach, and really enjoyed doing it. Like the old standards, good modern popular songs are great material for musicians who know how to create and play and craft. A beautiful song is a beautiful vehicle for improvisation.

Recorded by Nathaniel Facey (alto sax), Lewis Wright (vibes), Ryan Trebilcock (bass) and Josh Morrison (drums) at the Premises, London. Empirical play the Barbican on November 20.

Jonathan Gee

Nude seems at first like a standard rock harmony, but Radiohead's music is multilayered and they're great at arrangement and texture. If you had the sheet music, you could easily just strum along on a guitar and it would sound roughly like Nude. But that's not the point. You can pick the bare bones of a Duke Ellington tune out on the piano, but then there are a million possibilities for enriching it. I tried to do this the way Ornette Coleman might have: painting the picture of the melody, and then commenting on it, concentrating on a sound, rather than trying to repeat it in a string of different ways.

Jonathan Gee plays with the Monk Liberation Front at the Octave Bar, Covent Garden, on November 15.

Chris Sharkey (Trio VD)

We spent all day playing it until it sounded like us. The harmony is simple, but the Radiohead sound is distinctive - lots of ambient and textural things that are almost orchestral. We played quite together over that bare drum pattern at the start, then Christophe takes the melody for a walk - but when Thom Yorke sings, "You've gone off the rails", the sax does just that. It's a bit literal, but it felt right. We usually play all-original material we generate between us, but this was a cool thing to do, to have someone else come up with the seed.

Recorded/mixed/mastered by Ben Hammond at The Chairworks, Castleford. Chris Sharkey (guitar), Christophe de Benezec (sax), Chris Bussey (drums). Trio VD plays the Clore Ballroom, South Bank Centre on November 23.

Iain Ballamy (Food)

I didn't know the song, but it has quite a jazzy feel, with those brushes on the ride cymbal, the voice a bit bluesy. I said to Ashley Slater, who produced our album Molecular Gastronomy, I didn't want to do a cover but an impression, using the ambience at the front of the song and the drums and cymbal, and to remember this was supposed to be a Food version of Radiohead. Then I recorded a couple of takes on the saxophone over his mix. Maybe jazz musicians using these songs is rekindling the role standards used to have, where jazzers played on the popular songs of the day rather than playing standards because Miles or Trane did it. What makes a song suitable for improvising on is a subtle thing. A lot of pop is very formulaic. Jazz musicians reharmonise and reinterpret, and they need something to go on; the most enduring pop songs will have that extra something.

Recorded by Ashley Slater and Mike Mower; produced/programmed/mixed by Ashley Slater at the Bespoke Shed, Brighton. Iain Ballamy is at Kings Place, London, on November 14 and the Wigmore Hall, London, on November 23.

Liane Carroll

I loved the space in this song. It's ethereal, very clever melody writing and deceptively simple. I'm not a cerebral artist - it's gut instinct with me. I tried not to listen to it too many times: I didn't want to find myself just making a copy. I stopped drinking this spring - after years of it, I woke up one morning and thought, "OK, I'm full." Being pissed would certainly have put me in the zone for a plaintive, sad song like this. But I'm in a different zone now, and I approached it with a lot more clarity.

Recording by Neal Richardson and engineered by David Gray in Aberdeen. Liane Carroll plays the 606 Club on November 23.