Entries associated with the tag "Wbez":

Since WBEZ pretty much eliminated all needle-drop programming (i.e. simply playing a song and letting us get our own experience from it), the new shape of music on the station has been emerging slowly. The daily news magazine Eight Forty-Eight recently introduced a new feature that draws attention to local musicians, airing every Thursday morning. But instead of the acts getting to highlight their own work, the feature finds them covering a tune “outside their genre.” Judging from the list of performers and tunes planned for the first two months this is kind of a nebulous characterization. I mean, the Zincs are a rock band, and last I checked so is the band they cover on February 8, Echo & the Bunnymen.

Now, I know a lot of readers love to see me as a very negative person. I must say that I’m glad that WBEZ is putting a little spotlight on some local bands and is encouraging them to do some different stuff. But, on the other hand, I find it nearly impossible not to see the station simply exploiting the novelty factor of this project. “Hey, let’s have a garage band (Detholz!) cover a pop-reggae tune (Eddie Grant ’s”Electric Avenue”). That’ll be crazy!” The program’s Web site doesn’t mention who comes up with these ideas, but either way there’s an implicit judgment that focusing on the original music of these artists is less interesting than hearing them play goofy covers. Plus, most of the first eight acts are essentially rock acts, and having them cover soul and country songs isn’t much of a stretch. Stay-tuned for more on the WBEZ Watch!

Tomorrow night, January 4, marks the final night of jazz programming on WBEZ, and the station made a strange announcement about it this morning on the locally produced news program Eight Forty-Eight. Jazz critic John McDonough—a longtime contributor to Down Beat and a notorious enemy of most artistic advancements in the music over the last four decades—filed a report investigating whether the loss of jazz on the radio was really worth lamenting.

He interviewed some heavy-hitters in the local jazz scene—Lauren Deutsch, executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Jason Koransky, editor of Down Beat—who admitted that they don’t actually listen to jazz on the radio, and then interviewed his 17-year-old son and a few of his friends, who said they prefer listening to music on the Internet and their iPods. This, McDonough essentially said, suggested that music programming was no longer useful. I'll admit that I don’t listen to the radio much either, but I'm not the average listener. Neither is Deutsch or Koransky. We get loads of CDs in the mail and earn a living listening to them. If I didn’t have such access, radio would be the ideal medium to hear new stuff.

JIC alum Penny Tyler told McDonough she stopped listening to jazz on WBEZ because the programming was terrible, and it’s true that former music director Chris Heim turned the station's once-diverse programming to shit during her too-long tenure. But not once did McDonough wonder if better music might get audiences to tune back in. He did interview Tribune critic Howard Reich, who posited that most of the criticism aimed at WBEZ’s jazz programming was generated by local insiders bitter about their lack of control over it. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but there are an awful lot of outsiders who aren't listening to the programs. 

Finally, in the story's idiotic conclusion, McDonough said that jazz and blues (which is also getting the hook) weren't doing too bad in Chicago. As proof he pointed out that House of Blues has become a nationwide franchise, as if the club (which books jazz almost never and blues only sparingly) were some sort of homegrown operation done good, which it's not--it didn't start here and it's been a chain for more than a decade now. He also cites the presence of jazz at Ravinia and Symphony Center (each puts on maybe six or seven concerts a year) and the programming at the Jazz Institute as further evidence. But these are all venues that, much like WBEZ, focus on national and international artists, largely ignoring the individuals who are key to the local scene's survival.

The piece contained so many intersecting agendas that it’s hard to tabulate them all--a good chunk of the story took pains to explain that public radio's audience was best served by thoughtful news programming because it isn't available elsewhere (cough, cough). But ultimately it was WBEZ patting WBEZ on the back for its own controversial decision.

To listen for yourself, go to the Eight Forty-Eight audio library for January 3 (scroll down to “Music Programming Changes Hit Home”) and let the disbelief sink in. Then let’s hear what you have to say.

The loss of jazz programming is usually the focus when discussions about the future of WBEZ crop up, but that genre isn’t the only victim of upcoming schedule changes. Disappearing from the station come January is Blues Before Sunrise, a wonderful long-running show hosted by Steve Cushing that offers one of the most comprehensive, intelligent, educational, and entertaining surveys of black music prior to World War II; it covers classic blues, country blues, black gospel, early black vocal combos, jump blues, early electric blues, and other great stuff that falls in between the cracks. Luckily, WDCB (90.9), the radio station of the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, has stepped up to give the invaluable program a new home at the same exact time slot, Saturday nights from midnight to 5 AM.

Although Cushing is a veritable Chicago institution, his program has been nationally syndicated for years, and it’s currently heard on 75 different stations. For the last decade or so Cushing was forced to pony up the cash to make the program available to NPR subscriber stations via a satellite uplink—to the tune of about $900 a month. Cushing usually managed to scrape together enough sponsorship to keep the service going, but he says he was thinking about pulling the plug when an Internet-based solution saved the day. For the last year or so Cushing has made the program available to stations via an FTP site where stations simply download the five one-hour segments, costing him just a tenth of what the uplink service set him back.

Blues Before Sunrise will launch on WDCB on January 7.

Thanks to Gapers Block for pointing to this: yesterday the Washington Post ran an article about a new report from the National Endowment for the Arts that’s critical of National Public Radio’s trend of eliminating music programming in favor of news. The posture is a bit surprising: the NEA has hardly been a progressive force in the years since it caught flak for supporting Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Finley, and other artists who poisoned our society. (Yes, I'm being sarcastic.) 

The story quotes the report: “'There appears to be a tendency for public stations to discourage music programming in favor of news/talk broadcasts as a way to draw larger audiences,’ the NEA study says. But because it receives tax dollars, ‘public radio has an obligation beyond maximizing audiences.’ The NEA concludes that public radio ‘should balance its drive for audiences and revenues with a commitment to cultural programming and services that are not necessarily profitable.’”

The report was made in response to declining opportunities to hear classical music -- something Chicago’s WBEZ has never had to bother with, thanks to WFMT. But the basic points about music certainly apply to our own local NPR station. NPR chief exec Ken Stern offers some bullshit explanations for the shift that resemble the kind of babble that BEZ boss Torey Malatia has been spouting for the last few years. The good ol' Internet is to blame -- thanks to the Interweb, Stern says, access to jazz, international, and other non-commercial music is a piece of cake.

Ahem. Anyone interested in these marginal art forms must now work to hear the stuff, and while you can hear a lot of great stuff online, if you’re not savvy you’ll probably never find it. If you can’t afford a computer or Internet access -- oh, well, you're not part of the "public" in National Public Radio, I guess. The people who fork over cash to NPR are most certainly not among the computer-impaired. Stern also talks about the a bogus-sounding “community” that can be built around NPR’s digital download offerings, which seems just as silly as WBEZ turning to the community to program its art coverage.     

I’ve written about this several times, but response has been limited to nonexistent. I don’t think there’s any debate about the continued need for music qua music on public radio, but am I alone in being aghast at NPR’s assumptions about who they’re serving and what resources those listeners have?

Last Friday I mentioned a Tribune story about how the revamped WBEZ had altered its plans to abandon all music programming by retaining Passport and creating a one-hour, weekly jazz show with Dick Buckley and Dan Bindert. In his Sun-Times column yesterday, media reporter Robert Feder revealed that the station is also keeping Afropop Worldwide, Ken Nordine's Word Jazz, Sound Opinions, and American Routes.

It's better than nothing, I guess, but aren't you still curious about how management's much-ballyhooed listener-input concept on the station's second frequency (WBEW, 89.5) will actually sound? They're still strangely secretive about it.

Today’s Tribune has a pair of stories related to WBEZ’s decision to eliminate music programming in January. The better of the two is a fascinating profile of long-time jazz DJ Dick Buckley, 82, whose deep knowledge of early jazz remains unparalleled in town. According to the article, station management recently proposed a one-hour jazz program that would be cohosted by Buckley and fellow jazz personality Dan Bindert. But like an increasing amount of the station’s programming, music would be secondary to yapping -- in the form of interviews with “jazz artists, aficionados, and historians.” Buckley says he “isn’t thrilled” with the idea.    

The other story examines the efforts of Mike Widell and Hillel Frankel, who’ve organized the websites savethemusiconwbez.org and boycottwbez.com as desperate measures to force the station to retain its music programming. Unsurprisingly, their efforts have fallen on deaf ears at WBEZ, which has been strangely tight-lipped and vague about its future plans. (Although since making its announcement about the cessation of music programming last spring, the station has decided to keep some vestige of Passport, its world music show, and the aforementioned jazz program.) From what little station management has said about music’s role at the station starting next year, it seems that the proposed jazz show will be the template -- discussions and stories about music and musicians rather than music itself.

While there’s certainly a place for such broadcast journalism, this decision seems to imply that straight music programming is too sophisticated or too boring for listeners. That’s a rather sad assessment, and it only seems to bolster the station’s arrogance as an arbiter for good taste -- something WBEZ has not exactly excelled at with music programming over the last decade.