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This week on Jazz Spectrum – April 19-21, 2024

By Fritz ByersThe tenor saxophonist Lester Young is widely – and I think plausibly – credited with inventing the use of the word “cool” to describe something hip or fashionable or, well, you know. That alone should land him in one or more Halls of Fame – who in American history has more enduringly shaped the national vocabulary with a single word? This cracks me up: the original OED isn’t having any of this use of cool. BUT, in a supplement, the editors added several usages. Read More

FM 91 Programing Changes

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Mondays - Radio Alchemy from 12 a.m. - 1 a.m. Mondays - Great Lakes Odyssey Radio Hour from 7 p.m. - 8 p.m. Tuesdays - Early Music Now from 10 p.m. - 11 p.m. Fridays - Jazz Spectrum Fridays from 8 p.m. - 10 p.m. Saturdays - Saturday Afternoon at the Opera from 1 p.m. - 4 p.m. Sundays - Electronic Currents from 8 p.m. - 10 p.m. For a full schedule visit wgte.org/schedules Read More

This Week on Jazz Spectrum - 4/12

Jazz Spectrum

By Fritz ByersThis Friday’s 10pm hour presents in its entirety the pianist Andrew Hill’s 1964 triumph, Point of Departure. Twined with the five tracks from that album are two cuts from the guitarist Nels Cline’s 2006 date, New Monastery: A View into the Music of Andrew Hill. Each of the Cline excursions is tied to Point of Departure. Read More

‘Finding Festivals’ Accepted by The National Educational Telecommunications Association for National Distribution

Media & Press

Local producer and show host Haylie Robinson’s Finding Festivals airing again on WGTE Public MediaWGTE Public Media is proud to re-air the full 13-episode season of Finding Festivals, created by local producer and show host Haylie Robinson. The program is now available through The National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA), a nationwide program distribution service to members, public television stations and independent producers. Read More

This Week on Jazz Spectrum - 4/5

Jazz Spectrum

By Fritz Byers In 1930, Babe Ruth signed a contract with the Yankees under which he was paid $80,000 a year to play baseball. At the time, Herbert Hoover occupied the position of President of the United States. It is a measure of the quaintness of those days, and of the near-century of ensuing dislocations, that a journalist thought it apropos to ask Babe if he deserved to make more money than the President. Read More

This week on Jazz Spectrum – March 30, 2024

Jazz Spectrum

By Fritz ByersThere’s nothing like teaching a class to help you learn. A blog post or two ago I mentioned I’m teaching a jazz-history class. Here’s a thanks to Lourdes for letting me do it and to the students for being so thoughtful and giving me so much to think about. Since Tuesday’s class I’ve been thinking about hard bop – you know, the style that emerged as a reaction to cool jazz, which was a reaction to bop, which was a reaction to swing, which . . .. Read More

The Love of Electronic Dance Music

Electronic Currents

By Richard PatonEvery fall, millions of Americans listen to Electronic Dance Music.
They may not label it as such. Some, when asked, might well say they don’t really like that kind of music.
But listen, they do, as “Sandstorm” by Darude blasts through the PA systems at NFL and college football stadiums around the country. Read More

Charles Lloyd: The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow

Jazz Spectrum

By Fritz ByersCharles Llloyd Photo Album Credit: Photo and Design by Dorothy Darr

Jazz flourished in the 1950s with a sprawling diversity of styles that at once reflected and rebelled against the air-conditioned-nightmare qualities of that decade. Bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, third-stream hybrids, Tristano-Konitz complexities, and more. Read More

On Tommy Flanagan (born March 16, 1930)

Jazz Spectrum

By Fritz Byers At the end of the 1950s, John Coltrane surveyed the departing decade and its admixture of swing, bebop, cool (and its sibling/cousin/offspring, West Coast jazz), hard bop, and whatever Miles Davis was up to that week, and thought it was time to say goodbye to all that (even to Miles’s modal masterwork, Kind of Blue, to which Coltrane contributed indispensably.) So he wrote “Giant Steps,” a tune whose chord structure and harmonic invitations are so dense, complex, and hectic that it would be difficult to play even if ‘Trane hadn’t chosen the br Read More

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