Personally, what I consider
most important in hosting a jazz radio show is that the listening audience
knows that I, the DJ, take the music, and not myself, oh so seriously.
The music is what's profound, not I.Personally, what I consider
most important in hosting a jazz radio show is that the listening audience
knows that I, the DJ, take the music, and not myself, oh so seriously.
The music is what's profound, not I.
Jazz is a special and unique American art form, defined in part by it's diverse musical colors, flavors, tempos and moods. When doing the show on-air I try to highlight jazz in it's many different characters, offering samples of some of it's many distinctive and contrasting attributes: simplicity/complexity, joy/pathos, heart-rending beauty and teeth grinding dissonance. From other worldly celestial soaring reaches to down-to-earth blues and streetwise bop, the main ingredient which matters to me is that sweeping, driving quality of jazz in motion, the rhythm, the way the music moves and moves it's listeners. To any question of what real jazz is (or does), I'm sure you'll agree that real jazz swings. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.
As a jazz programmer still learning new things, I include myself as part of the audience. I see myself as participating in, and contributing to, an expansive, organic, listening experience which results in appreciation of jazz by the listener that continues past the time the show ends. An effect, hopefully, that is roughly similar to that which one gets from observing works of history and art at a museum. Each piece, or jazz composition, is both drawn from and contributes to the art forms generated and developed by preceding generations of artists and innovators. In the case of jazz, that corps of innovators would include: Kid Ory, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Duke, Dizzy, Bird, Monk, Max, Miles, Bud, Trane, and many others. In teh communication of jazz, a tradition is upheld.
As Jazz Director here at WCDB, I serve not as a sort of curator or trustee over priceless relics and precious works of art (although in 19??, the US Congree passed HR 57, designating jazz as a "national treasure"); instead, I see myself as the tour guide, the guy who shows you around the museum for a length of time, providing access and brief intimacy with the pieces; the volunteer, friend of the institution who loves his privileged role in association with creative works of a proud cultural heritage.
Departing from my museum guide analogy, I also consider that rather than guiding the listener through a body of artifacts, or songs, which evoke images of a glorious artistic past, the flow of the jazz program reflects a swinging, happening present time and a promising future for the music. Paraphrasing a lyric from Horace Silver's "Nica's Dream", jazz music is of the future, you see. Progressive, future-directed, forward-looking, straight ahead, in the vanguard. Listeners who dig it have a right to consider themselves hip. Jazz and blues are the mainstream of all modern American musical genres. In this sense, jazz truly is "America's Classical Music".
Engaging, ambient, amusing, sophisticated, challenging, emotional--jazz itself comprises a substantive quality of the fabric of modern American culture. Subtly yet insistently, playing and listening to jazz enhances the quality of communication that takes place in our everyday lives. There is very little if anything that is escapist about jazz. You have to be there, in present time, in the moment, to appreciate it's effects. You may be listening to WCDB at work, for example, have it on in the background. But I'm sure that on several occassions you'll hear something that requires you to stop working and listen; it engages you, compels you to dig deeply the sounds, the groove, the swing. You may even be compelled to pick up the office phone, dial 442-4242 and say something like, "Man, Howard, that was really on the money...thanks, that made my day...Who WAS that??" And I very much enjoy those calls, the feedback from listeners like you. It's real jazz and real listeners who make my day.
Howard - Jazz Director
