Archives for May 20, 2006

As he moves toward the middle of his eighty-sixth year, Dave Brubeck is not slowing down. He’s picking up speed—and honors—and preparing a major work. Today he is at his alma mater, University of the Pacific, to collect another medal. For a story about Brubeck’s whirlwind week and his new project, go here.

A story in today’s Los Angeles Times has this headline:
Straight-ahead jazz may lose its KKJZ-FM gig
And this quote:

“KKJZ is a very famous jazz station and there aren’t many more around like them,” said Frank Sinatra Jr., son of the singing legend, and a professional musician who lives in West Los Angeles. “[Straight-ahead] jazz is the biggest music in the world, except in the country (where) it was created. It would be such a big loss if they stopped playing jazz. That station is the last lighthouse in the fog.”

The story is about what may be the next major step in the decimation of jazz on radio in the United States. Stations across the country are cutting back or abandoning jazz programming. They include independent broadcasters and many National Public Radio affiliates that have dropped NPR’s Jazz Profiles, Jazz Set, and Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz. KKJZ’s owner, the Long Beach branch of California State University, is soliciting proposals designed to put the station under management that will make it what the chairman of Pacific Public Radio calls “a cash cow ” for the university. Pacific Public Radio is the current operator of KKJZ and one of five radio companies asked to submit proposals.
To read the Times story, go here.
To listen to KKJZ on your radio in the Los Angeles area, tune to 88.1 FM. To hear it on your computer, go here.
The provost and senior vice president of Cal State Long Beach, the station’s license holder, is Dr. Dorothy Abrahamse, e-mail dabraham@csulb.edu

What can be hoped of an art which must necessarily depend on the favor of the public—of such a public, at least, as ours? Good work may, does sometimes, succeed. But never with the degree of success that befalls twaddle and vulgarity. Twaddle and vulgarity will always have the upper hand.
—Max Beerbohm, Saturday Review, September, 1908
We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart;
But, the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: It’s
clever, but is it Art?
—Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum of the Workshops