Contributors

David Brent Johnson

WFIU-FM Jazz Director

in Indiana. “I can be a rah-rah cheerleader for Indiana jazz,” he says. “So much incredible jazz came out of the state: Hoagy Carmichael, Wes Montgomery, Freddie Hubbard, and Gennett Records in Richmond, which released the most important early jazz records. Black and white musicians played together. Jazz was a progressive force for racial integration long before baseball.”

Johnson credits the jazz program at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and its leader, the late David Baker, for creating a built-in local audience for jazz. “They are very savvy, loyal, and sophisticated,” he says.

When he’s not on the air, Johnson is at home in Bloomington’s Near West Side reading history and writing fiction—and urging young people to follow their passion. “I got into doing jazz radio because I loved jazz, and I wanted to pass that along. Then I got lucky and it turned into something I could do for a living.” *

David Brent Johnson. Photo by Martin Boling

by Janet Mandelstam David Brent Johnson was in his early 20s and unsure of what he was going to do with his life until one day he was sitting in a Bloomington coffeehouse and he became aware of the music that was playing. “It was a recording by Count Basie,” he recalls, “and some kind of weird light went on in my brain. I went across the street to a record store, found a recording, and got obsessed with listening to jazz.”

That obsession eventually led Johnson, now 54, to radio, where today he is jazz director and host of two programs on WFIU-FM: the weekly, nationally syndicated Night Lights, which chronicles the history of jazz, and Just You and Me, weekday afternoon programs that feature contemporary and classical jazz.

Once smitten, Johnson, a native of Indianapolis and graduate of Indiana University, took a job in a record store, where he was responsible for the jazz section. “A friend planted a bug of doing a radio show,” he says, “so I made a proposal to WFHB.” And soon he was a volunteer DJ at Bloomington’s community radio station. When Joe Bourne, then WFIU’s reigning jazz host, was on a leave in 2002, Johnson was tapped to fill in. “From then on they used me as a part-time backup,” he says. He also produced some jazz specials for the station and in 2004 he created Night Lights. He became the permanent host of Just You and Me when Bourne stepped down from the show in 2011.

Along the way, with a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Johnson produced a four-part documentary on the history of jazz

editor’s message

Keep Bloomington Weird

Okay, we all know that Austin, Texas, has the national reputation for being weird, but I think Bloomington is just as weird.

Austin is considered weird because of its “anything goes” music and arts scene and because it’s the polar opposite politically from the rest of the state. Sound familiar?

I don’t worry about Bloomington losing its weirdness by changing from blue to red, but in this pandemic, I do worry about our musicians, theater community, and artists. The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music normally puts on more than a thousand performances a year. What are all those talented students doing now, I wonder?

Undoubtably, the music school will recover, but our local artistic community is more vulnerable. There are hardly any venues for musicians to play, our live theaters are dark, and our artists have fewer opportunities to sell their work.

I’m heartened by the fact that our theater companies have shown impressive resilience during the pandemic. A full rundown of the creative ways they’ve adapted can be found on Page 24. Another example of ingenuity is how the amazing Krista Detor put on a couple of plays for live audiences in her own backyard artist retreat (Page 30).

Our main feature story, “Celebrating Our Local Artists,” presents the creations of 17 artists who work in a variety of mediums. Maybe you’ll want to take home something.

What also makes Bloomington weird is that our downtown consists mainly of locally owned stores and restaurants. In most cities, downtowns are dominated by national chains; Indianapolis, for example.

The short feature in this issue, “Help Our Local Stores! Come Shop the Square,” will hopefully give a little boost to our locally owned retailers, both with purchases in person and online at their websites.

My fervent wish is that when the pandemic is finally over, our musicians, our theater groups, our artists, and our shops will still be here, and that Bloom will still be around to write about them.

Please Bloomington, stay weird.

Malcolm Abrams editor@magbloom.com