Jazz and Blues Lounge

The Song that Started it All for Me

by balaspa on July 19th, 2008

I was a punk kid who was into Pink Floyd. What I really wanted to do was be on the radio. I thought I was going to be the next Howard Stern or, more likely, the next Steve and Garry (two Chicago radio legends). I had worked at the tiny AM station that my college, Webster University, has created first. It was known as WEBU AM 660 and you could pick pretty much any shift you wanted and play whatever the hell you wanted. This created a scattered program schedule and no one ever listened. It only broadcasted to the dorms across the street. Our motto? “We Rock Two Blocks.”

Then Webster teamed up with a radio station whose license was currently held by the St. Louis Public School system - KSLH. It was on the FM dial, but down at the non-commercial end. The idea was to have some kind of educational use for it, but the school system had lost all intentions of using it. They wanted to sell the license, but they also needed to keep the station on the air in order to benefit from that sale. Webster agreed to take over putting programming on the air while they looked for a buyer. The school had to agree that, during the regular school year, 1 hour a day was set aside for one public school to broadcast on the station.

There was a choice given. The station could broadcast classical music or it could do jazz. With ideas of kids in grade school trying to pronounce classical compsor names, Webster chose jazz. Away went the little AM station and suddenly we had an all-day radio station to program.

I ended up doing afternoon drive. This would turn out to be the pinnnacle of my radio career. I was broadcasting on afternoon drive in a top-ten market in the United States and I got to pick all of my own music. I had to do every week day starting at 2 pm. It was pretty awesome.

I knew nothing about jazz. You could sound like you knew a lot by reading the liner notes and the backs of the albums. Jazz fans want to know who is the main guy playing and then all of the side men. For me, it was a contest with a guy on before me to see who could get away with playing the longest track. I think he ended up winning by playing a Keith Jarrett track that lasted almost a half an hour.

So, I picked out the album of Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” and put on the track you see below, called “All Blues” just because it was nearly ten minutes long. I planned to wander around the radio station, maybe make a phone call, or goof around in some way. I queued up the song and then did my announcing bit and then hit the start button for the turntable. As the tune started to play…I found myself completely unable to movie. I sat there, headphones on, and listened to the entire tune and then wanted to play it again when it was over.

Since then I have been a fan of jazz. I have put “Kind of Blue” on my list of all-time favorite albums of any genre. If people ask me for a jazz album recommendation, that is the one I tell them to listen to.

Below is a clip of Miles playing live with his classic band. This is one of the greatest jazz bands to ever exist on the musical genre. Some of the names you will know, but they were all relatively young and new when Miles found them.

Miles Davis - trumpet
Wayne Shorter - tenor sax
Herbie Hancock - piano
Ron Carter - bass
Tony Williams - drums

Enjoy and I hope the song appeals to you as much as it did for me that one fateful afternoon so many years ago in a college radio station at Webster University in St. Louis.

POSTED IN: Bands, Chicago, jazz, records