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 …
[TL;DR – See my radio portfolio on this website!] My motivation for launching this website was to help with marketing and attracting clients for my freelance writing and editing work. From that narrow perspective, I would have to say the site has not delivered success to this point. Such a view, however, suffers from a …
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 …
To commemorate the 75th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as well as the Russian invasion of Manchuria that started in between), I produced a special documentary episode of my weekly radio program, “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune,” that aired from noon to 2pm on August 7, 2020. Blending popular recordings from 1945 …
The March 2020 issue of The Syncopated Times newspaper will run my article on the historic 1920 recording of “Crazy Blues,” by Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds, the disc that opened the way for African American artists in the record business. The article explores the circumstances of the recording and the career of Perry …