In an earlier post I highlighted WBZ-Boston radio talk show host Paul Sullivan, who has cancer. Today it was announced that Sullivan has decided to enter hospice care. I would like to express my sincere best wishes to Paul and his family.
Category: Radio
35 Years of Ray Smith
I’ve received a nice note from a representative of WGBH Radio in Boston. Sunday evening is something that I’ve been looking forward to — the 35th anniversary of Ray Smith’s show on ‘GBH, The Jazz Decades. I have the FM tuner in my computer programmed to record it. If you don’t live near Boston, you can hear it streaming on the Web.
Greetings–
Hope all is well with you. I thought this might be of interest for you, either for your blog or personally. I hope you’ll have the chance to check out this interview on the website at http://wgbh.org/raysmith and tune in to the broadcast this Sunday. Ray Smith is truly one-of-a-kind.
All the best–
EdgarRay Smith Celebrates Three-and-a-Half Jazz Decades on WGBH 89.7
Record collector. World War II veteran. Jazz drummer. These are just a few of the many sides of Ray Smith, host of WGBH’s Jazz Decades. Each Sunday at 7pm, Ray shares his passion for jazz, big band, and swing with listeners all over the world, culling music for the program from the more than 90,000 titles in his personal collection.
This Sunday, Ray and WGBH celebrate 35 years producing Jazz Decades for public radio stations across the country. In honor of the occasion, we asked Ray to describe his lifelong love affair with music. You can hear the man behind the music, in his own words on this special webpage at http://wgbh.org/raysmith
And don’t miss Ray’s 35th anniversary broadcast this Sunday, August 5, at 7pm on WGBH 89.7 FM in New England and worldwide at http://wgbh.org/jazz
Some Fun Facts about Jazz Decades
- The Jazz Decades’ first broadcast was August 5, 1972
- Ray Smith and Jazz Decades celebrate 35 years on WGBH 89.7 on August 5, 2007
- For the past few years, Ray has recorded the show at his home studio in South Carolina and it is produced, engineered, and mixed at WGBH 89.7 in Boston.
- 35 years of Jazz Decades, once a week = 1,820 programs
- At an average of 12 songs per show, Ray Smith has spun approximately 21,840 tracks
- Ray has approximately 90,000 titles in his collection
- This means that in 35 years, Ray has played less than 25% of his entire collection, assuming he has never played the same song twice.
- At this rate, Ray will have to be on the air for over 105 more years to exhaust his entire collection, assuming he adds no new titles over this century-long period.
Fight the URGE
FiOS TV has added URGE Radio, on the stations that follow Music Choice. As I mentioned in a post in early June — unfortunately lost in the Great Database Debacle — the sound quality of the Music Choice stations is uniformly excellent. The same cannot be said of URGE Radio. Played over a digital coaxial cable going from the Motorola DVR into my Kenwood THX receiver, what I’ve heard so far sounds, at best, like a 128 Kbps MP3 at 22050 Hz. The player has four minutes of URGE Radio. Don’t judge the sound quality by this, as it’s encoded here at only 64 Kbps/22050 Hz.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/JUL07/URGERadio.flv 400 300]
As you can see, there’s a progress bar, but it doesn’t appear on all of the screens within a track, which sort of limits its usefulness. I’m not complaining about the service being added. I continue to be impressed with everything that FiOS TV offers for the money, but URGE Radio’s audio quality relegates it to the TV speakers.
June in July
Mark Evanier is helping legendary voice actor June Foray write her autobiography. She turns 90 this year! Evanier recently said he “will soon be announcing some sort of publication date, I hope.” June herself has a slightly different take on the situation. She was on WBZ radio in Boston late Sunday night, and this is what she said.
Boston Talk Show Host Paul Sullivan Quits
Six months ago, longtime WBZ-Boston morning drive-time radio announcer Gary Lapierre retired. At that time it was known that WBZ evening talk show host Paul Sullivan wouldn’t be holding court forever, having had three surgeries for brain cancer that was diagnosed in December 2004.
Sullivan recently underwent a fourth operation, and today he announced that he’s quitting his show, in the time slot that was vacated by the death of David Brudnoy, also in December 2004. Previously, he had followed Brudnoy. In a letter released today, Sullivan said, “The toll my surgeries and treatments have taken on me makes it unlikely that I will ever have the energy to return to a four-hour daily talk radio program.”
Here’s ten minutes of audio from a Paul Sullivan show last February to give you an idea of his style. The topic was Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, which I’ve covered here previously.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JUN07/PaulSullivanOnGore.mp3]Sullivan’s guest was from a political action committee that claimed Al Gore uses 20 times the amount of energy at his house as the average American home. [Link] The actual percentage is somewhat less than that [Link], but Sullivan ran with the number that was given to him by his guest.
At one time I’d have given Sullivan the benefit of the doubt and said he didn’t want to quibble with the details, because he wanted to focus on Gore’s apparent hypocrisy. But I’ve heard Sullivan over the years often enough to know that sometimes he doesn’t have enough facts at his fingertips.
Tonight, Sullivan was a caller to his own show, and I think that’s both funny and sad. Here’s a 10-minute clip. Note: The audio stream cuts out for a few moments in the middle.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JUN07/PaulSullivanWBZ.mp3]In the radio biz, Paul is a former minor league guy who made it to the major leagues and held his own. He’s a writer for The Lowell Sun, a small city newspaper, and while he’s not as well-read as Brudnoy the college professor was, Sullivan is smart and quick, with plenty of fight, and a good sense of humor to boot. It’s a real shame that Sullivan fell ill right when he was hitting his stride.
God Bless You, Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has died. He wasn’t young, and he was way older than he had a right to be, considering he never quit smoking, but it still sucks that he’s gone. Vonnegut wrote The Sirens of Titan, a book that l enjoyed reading very much, and he wrote the wonderful TV movie called Between Time and Timbuktu. It was produced by WGBH in Boston for PBS, back when it was called National Educational Television. The movie opened with Cousin Brucie, so I had to love it. It’s not available on video, sorry to say. The show also featured the comedy team of Bob and Ray, who got their start on Boston radio. Ray Goulding was absolutely hilarious in Between Time and Timbuktu as Walter Gesundheit, a parody of the legendary TV newsman Walter Cronkite.
