Local Anesthetic
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Yet during the 40-some hours of weekly jazz programming on WBEZ, the only local artists you’re likely to hear are middle-of-the-road vocalists like Patricia Barber and Kurt Elling. Over the past five years the station has been streamlining its programming, says general manager Torey Malatia. “It’s not supposed to be different shows by different people that just happen to occur on the same radio station. We want everyone working together, kind of like a theater troupe. I think that’s good broadcasting. It doesn’t mean that every person plays exactly the same thing, but they participate in the generation of the mix, and there happens to be one person leading the effort.”
In music, that one person is director Chris Heim, and in jazz the mix she wants to generate is a narrowly and sometimes mysteriously defined mainstream jazz. The shift has forced out DJ Neil Tesser, who played a lot of local jazz and brought to his shows a level of critical independence and historical background that’s been missing at the station since his departure. It has also diluted the distinctive personalities of hard-bop specialist Larry Smith and early-jazz expert Dick Buckley. “Any time you hear Larry Smith playing a tango record, you know it’s not his choice,” says Mark Ruffin, who replaced Tesser in late 1996 and was fired last month.
Malatia says it’s unfair to judge the station’s commitment to local jazz based solely on the jazz programming, because as part of his team strategy, programs that are not exclusively about jazz are supposed to touch on it. For instance, Ken Vandermark was featured on the station’s morning program Eight Forty-Eight. But that was after Vandermark won the “genius” grant, when everyone in town was clamoring for an interview, and despite that acknowledgment of his importance, his music has still never been included in the station’s jazz programming.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Michael Jackson.
