Category: Radio

Low Fidelity, High Quality

Louis Armstrong and King OliverBack in December I mentioned the WGBH radio program The Jazz Decades, hosted by Ray Smith. This Sunday’s show featured some noteworthy restored 1920’s recordings that are of particular interest to Smith — King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, with Louis Armstrong.

Smith rhapsodizes at length during the twenty five minutes of the program that are on the audio player, recorded off of my computer’s FM tuner. I fiddled with the dipole antenna for a few moments at the beginning, as will be obvious if you listen.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/APR07/JazzDecadesApr1-07.mp3]

Not being a musician myself, I appreciate these acoustic (non-electrical) recordings more for their historical and technical significance, but Smith’s infectious enthusiasm for the virtuosity of the performances is fun to hear. Note: At one point Smith refers to 1933 when he meant to say 1923.

More with Pet and Cousin Brucie on PBS

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/MAR07/PetBruce.flv 400 242]

Here’s another slice and splice with Petula Clark and legendary NY DJ Cousin Bruce Morrow from the PBS special My Music: The British Beat. I don’t actually agree with Pet’s comment that the Beatles were her big break in America. Her success was her own, of course, but if anybody deserves some credit for paving the way for Petula it was Julie Andrews, who had been in America for nearly ten years by that point. And before the Beatles the James Bond movies were hugely influential in opening up the U.S. to all things British.

Cousin Brucie on WABC Saturday Night Oldies

Cousin Brucie on WABC

Tonight I happened to catch a few minutes of the legendary disk jockey Bruce Morrow on WABC’s Saturday Night Oldies with Mark Simone. Cousin Brucie talks about meeting the Beatles.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/MAR07/CousinBrucie.mp3]

Bruce Morrow with Beatles

If you haven’t checked out my tribute to New York radio in the 60’s, click here. The picture above of Bruce Morrow interviewing the Beatles in 1965 is amusing, because the boys appeared bored and disinterested. Maybe they were stoned. Or perhaps they’d had their fill of New York DJ’s. Murray “The K” Kaufman had leveraged his contact with The Beatles during their first visit to shamelessly further his own career.

All-Classical WGBH

Boston’s commercial Classical music radio station, WCRB, is struggling at its new frequency, according to a recent news account, as seen below. The moment it left its original frequency can be heard here.

Meanwhile, public station powerhouse WGBH is now offering its HD Radio all-Classical music channel on the Net. Bravo. Way to go. Encoding runs at 128 Kbps, and it sounds fine. I just added this link for it on my Windows desktop.

Reception is mixed to new WCRB signal, programming

By Clea Simon, Globe Correspondent | January 25, 2007

Is WCRB-FM fading out?

While the Dec. 1 move of the commercial classical station’s frequency, from 102.5 to 99.5, has made tuning in troublesome for some listeners, changes in the station’s programming have raised other questions. In Boston’s classical music community, the reception to both the signal and the revived station has been mixed.
Continue reading All-Classical WGBH

Guerilla Lawsuit Day

It was supposed to be Gorilla Suit Day, and instead it turned into Guerrilla Lawsuit Day!

The spin machine is working. There’s lots of tough talk, and an arrest has been made in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force “guerrilla” advertising campaign.

Artist arrested for planting marketing figures

By Maria Cramer and Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff

The man who sent city and State Police rushing to defuse what they believed were explosive devices around the Boston region was arrested tonight.

Attorney General Martha Coakley scheduled a 9 p.m. press conference to announce the arrrest of Peter Berdvosky, an Arlington artist.

What stopped the city was the way the situation was handled. Here’s audio from WBZ radio. You’ll hear some of a news report, the beginning of Paul Sullivan’s talk show, and part of the opening statement at that 9 p.m. news conference by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley. Lots of talk about getting tough, along with the usual compliments about how well all of the various agencies cooperated, and what a great job everybody is doing, blah, blah, blah…

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JAN07/WBZBostonTerror.mp3]

The Boston Globe has posted this editorial, and I’m glad it includes the following comment:

Homeland Security experts will need to review the response of local law enforcement. Public safety personnel may have overreacted; local bloggers apparently identified the guerrilla advertising campaign early on.

The fact that the promotional campaign was orchestrated by an advertising agency on behalf of The Cartoon Network isn’t incidental or irrelevant, but these mysterious objects could have been a stunt by college kids. Does this mean that ANYthing out of the ordinary, no matter what it is, can result in an emergency response of such magnitude? If so, then we’ve lost the war on terrorism.