Category: Music

I’m not a huge Jazz fan. Somewhere along the line, for my taste Jazz became so much about improvisation there wasn’t enough structure left to hang onto. Sunday evenings there’s a radio show on WGBH in Boston I enjoy, called The Jazz Decades, hosted by Ray Smith, who by now must be in his 80’s. He specializes in music from the 20’s and 30’s, playing both original recordings from then, as well as more recent renditions of old songs. When necessary, Smith resorts to vinyl, as he did tonight.

The audio player below has 35 minutes of The Jazz Decades show. I was going to offer only 10 minutes of it, but tonight’s selections were interesting, so I let it roll. I was surprised to hear my town, Hopkinton, MA, mentioned. Apparently, there was a legendary place here called The Sticky Wicket, that featured live Jazz until about 15 years ago, which is news to me.

There are some splices in this recording. The first 24 minutes were taken from the FM tuner in my PC. Then, for contrast, right after he says, “This is Ray Smith,” I switched over to WGBH’s live streaming Net audio. For the 1930’s recordings, the loss in sound quality isn’t all that apparent. But I still look forward to the time when all live Net radio is at least 128 Kbps.

Being the once-upon-a-time radio guy that I am, some of the doings in the broadcasting business interest me. I have a more than casual appreciation of Classical music, although I would not call myself a connoisseur, by any means. There are two Classical music stations in Boston — WGBH 89.7 FM and WCRB, which from 1954 until today (Friday) was at 102.5 FM. WGBH is a public station, named after the Great Blue Hill. WCRB stands for Charles River Broadcasting, and it’s a commercial station.

WCRB has in recent years been derided as “Classical Lite.” Playings of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons have become a bit too frequent, and during “drive time” no complete works are played. But still, one can count on WCRB to be playing Classical music, even when WGBH switches to Jazz in the evening.

Earlier this year, WCRB was sold. The business dealings were a little complicated, and if you want to read about them, click here. The upshot is that today at noon, WCRB swapped frequencies with a Country music station, WKLB at 99.5. WCRB is now broadcasting over an antenna that’s not west of Boston, but north, near the New Hampshire border, far away from the Charles River. The general consensus is that WCRB is the loser in the deal, but we’re lucky it’s still a Classical format.

The recording on the audio player below is from the FM tuner in my computer. I shortened the gap of dead air between the end of WCRB and the start of WKLB, but otherwise this is how the rather abrupt end of an era sounded today in Boston. If you know the piece of music that WCRB used to close its 52 years at 102.5, you’ll get the sly and wry joke.