Klarinet Archive - Posting 000432.txt from 1999/01

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Jazz radio (was Kenny G Concert Review)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 10:12:33 -0500

Kenneth Wolman wrote,
>>For you outlanders, WKCR-FM and WBGO-FM are jazz stations for serious jazz
listeners, players, player wanna-bes, and old fashioned aficionados. Any
station Phil Schapp DJs for has to be serious:-). Schapp has been known to
do 24-hour Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, or Eric Dolphy
marathons: takes, outtakes, retakes, screw-ups, drunken and/or narked-up
rants at the band in the studio...you name it, Phil plays it. A lot of
this music is not "easy listening".... >>

Yeeeooooooow, I'm so jealous. The last full-time jazz station in Washington,
D. C. was sold about a year ago. The new owner changed the format to a
mixture of moderately serious jazz, "soft jazz" and easy listening. Seems to
me there's less jazz and more jazzite every day. I don't expect to hear
anything like Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz" on there any time soon, or any
real progressive jazz. In Washington, D. C., the home of so many great live
jazz venues in the past, we've now got only two or three struggling clubs
left, and not one full-time jazz radio station to raise interest among members
of the next generation. It's a vicious circle. There's not enough market to
support a jazz station (quoth the pundits), but without a jazz station or a
healthy club scene, where's the market going to come from? IMHO it would help
develop a new generation of jazz fans if someone would open a family-friendly
jazz club where jazz-loving parents could bring their kids earlier in the
evening than the traditional night club hours, and where the emphasis is on
music, not on booze; yet the atmosphere would stay informal, not like a
concert hall where people have to sit still and shut up.

Of course here in the Nation's Capitol, we can listen to Kenny G all around
the dial. Just hit that "search" button and there he is. You could get
diabetes from listening to that. I don't begrudge him the money. He earns
his living with his horn and that's more than I'll ever be able to say. Too
bad he doesn't do some serious jamming now and then, just to prove he still
can, if that part of the story is true.

Lelia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"One jazzer's jazz is another jazzer's junk."
--Ian Whitcomb, _After the Ball_, 1972.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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