Today I aired a special “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune”—a radio time capsule. On September 21, 1939, the CBS station in Washington, DC, WJSV, recorded its entire day of programming and gave the tapes to the National Archive. It’s the earliest surviving example of this national mass medium in its swaggering stride, and of the flow …
I still derive a lot of pleasure from artifacts of U.S. popular culture dating from the period between the two world wars. The jazz age, the Harlem Renaissance period, the pre-code years of the first talking pictures, and the so-called great American songbook of show tunes and popular standards all represent what I view as …
The April 2024 issue of The Syncopated Times, independent monthly newspaper out of Utica, New York, has on its front page my interview with jazz musician, actor, and author Steve Provizer. Our topic was the legacy of mixed-race jazz recordings, as described in his book, As Long As They Can Blow: Interracial Jazz Recordings and …
“Feeling For Life” is the title I gave my most recent radio special–a two-hour exploration of Indonesian music and musicology. My special guest, Cornell Emeritus Professor of Music and Asian Studies Marty Hatch, founded the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble in 1972. He gave a vivid picture of the role of Javanese music, as understood by Western …
My weekly radio broadcast, “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune,” is an endless source of pleasure for me (and my handful of fans!). This past week I did one of my best-ever specials–a timely piece from nine decades ago, if you know what I mean, about the banking crisis of early 1933. The Great Depression truly “hit …