I remember one of my dedicated listeners called during my night show Sound, Color and Movement [inspired by a Sun Ra lp title] while an Albert Ayler selection was blasting over the airwaves. Hughes says research by the Radio Research Consortium shows its largely over 55. In 1980, an anti-proliferation program included a War of the Worlds-style simulated nuclear attackone which some listeners believed was real, according to a 1981 Post article. Other programs that had been cut were offered their old slotspartially quelling the programming outrage. Theyre not the peoples station, said another. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Current is an editorially independent, nonprofit service of the American University School of Communication. A DJ looks back on 50 years on jazz radio in the nations capital. He convinced the management of WGMS, the classical music station in Washington, that it should air jazz, Americas classical music. The jazz aficionado hosts "A Sunday Kind of Love" at noon on Sundays on WPFW 89.3 FM. DC. Not too long after the show, Askia Muhammad from WPFW told me how much he learned from the interview. 202-588-0999 ext. NPR offered programs such as Jazz Alive, Marian McPartlands Piano Jazz, and JazzSet, which were aired on WAMU. He and my father-in-law, Tom Barrett, shared a close friendship with John Malachi. And their listeners and their loyal supporters are still here. Baseball You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Find fun, interesting, informative things to do Or post your upcoming event on our website! The assassination of Rev. Talk shows were followed by jazz; many programs had hybrid formats. The talk never stops and the music never ends was how some programmers put it, according to Porter, an early host at the station. Hughes looked haggard as he stepped out of the studioweathered, unshaven. An informed announcer on the radio provides the names of the soloists and tells stories about the music, conveying what Whitney Balliett called and Larry Appelbaum named his show: The Sound of Surprise. WPFW no longer has the reputation as Radio Farrakhan that it gained in the late 1980s; the speeches by the Nation of Islam leader and by radical black-nationalist thinkers like Frances Cress Welsing that sometimes appeared on the defunct program Freedom of Speech are gone. The Beacons award-winning content covers health, financial, technology, housing, travel and arts topics, as well as local events and feature stories. var addy9275 = 'kstitt' + '@'; Readers of our three print editions pick up more than 179,000 copies each month at more than 2,000 distribution sites. About Douy Latest NEWS Load more More News @DOUYEMUSIC Happy 2023 Cheers to life. Melody Gardot, Over the Rainbow, Rick Williams, Evening Drive Jazz: Privacy Policy I served on a program selection panel with Dr. Billy Taylor, where we discovered we had some personal connections. WAMU now focuses almost entirely on talk and public affairs. Steve Hoffman hosted a blues show and Ernest White did public affairs. There was some community opposition to the sale, but not enough to stop the sale, and the station went off the air in 1997. Worried that the anti-Pacifica invective could turn obscene or libelous, Watson had engineer Bob Daughtry instruct techs at WPFWs transmitter at American University to pull the plug. As a VISTA volunteer, I became connected to a community organization in Adams Morgan called The New Thing Art and Architecture Center, where I met Sondra Barrett, who was teaching African dance to children. It sponsored jazz cruises where Jazz90 listeners could hear Sarah Vaughan, Joe Williams, Clark Terry, Jay McShann, Benny Carter, and Phil Woods, and it cosponsored performances by Wynton Marsalis at Lorton and the DC Youth Center to enable the incarcerated to hear great music. View the profiles of people named Miyuki Williams. Just one editorial note; Spirits Known and Unknown preceded S,C&M. //--> Although the organization folded, I kept the title of The New Thing Root Music Show through the seventies. var prefix = 'ma' + 'il' + 'to'; The underground format would become a feature of commercial FM stations such as WHFS. addy25885 = addy25885 + 'wpfw' + '.' + 'org'; [Editors note: WAMU canceled Hot Jazz Saturday Night in June 2018.] WETA has been featuring European classical music since WGMS changed format. The program was hosted, as it has been for the past 36 years, by longtime D.C. resident Miyuki Williams. Mumble Sauce, About Us But even then, because fundraising covered only a fraction of the costs and Pacificas bylaws wouldnt let stations accept any kind of corporate underwriting, the foundation footed some of the bill for years. I first met him when he was playing bass with Julie Moore Turner in a club at Fourteenth and Rhode Island Avenue, NW, when it was a rough neighborhood. But he insists hes been listening to the communitys feedback. The Bama Hour was so popular that WPFW gave him another show featuring jazz on Sunday afternoons called The Other Side of the Bama. Certainly, those are among the underserved communities Hughes was talking about. Williams said her appreciation of jazz began when listening as a kid to the records played by her father, a career Army soldier, at their home at Fort Dix, New Jersey. To Hughes, whos led the nonprofit WPFW for nearly two years, the solution is running a station of musical obsessives and anti-establishmentarians more like a businesswhich means, in his telling, crafting a less jarring programming schedule that he hopes will bring a bigger audience and fill the stations coffers with more donations. John Hughes has caused us to be on the brink of disaster, said Katea Stitt, one of WPFWs 12 paid staffers as well as a volunteer programmer. //