FEATURE PIECE
Now's The Time: Keeping Jazz Alive by Alejandra Díaz-Pizarro
W
KCR may as well stand for “We Keep Collecting Relics.” Even the most surface-level survey of the station yields enough artifacts to fill a museum wing: a red Naugahyde armchair where Dizzy Gillespie once sat1— since reupholstered, but whose original fabric lives on in preserved scraps. Old (and oldfashioned) posters advertising WKCR’s flagship music festivals. Cracked and scratched records that have found a second life as décor pieces that herald our analog spirit. A stack of Billie Holiday books. Polaroids of board members dating back at least two decades. A wall’s worth of newspaper clippings tracing a loose and loopy chronology of the station. To say nothing of the miles, very possibly acres, of reel-to-reel tapes shelved in our archive room, so heavy that the building had to install a speciallyreinforced floor to bear the weight. Amid these piles of history, it is easy to forget that these items have not always been frozen in the past, but were once alive in a vibrant present. Those posters were once promotional, those records once spun on a turntable, those photographed folks were once up-and-coming DJs, those reel-to-reel tapes once were not rare but everyday occurrences on shows. WKCR has a dual mission to preserve and innovate, to be at once a haven for historical significance and a hub for artistic exploration.2 In the 21st century, the rapid pace and increasingly-commercial bent of the music 1. Remnick, David. “Bird-Watcher.” The New Yorker, 12 May 2008. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2008/05/19/bird-watcher. 2. “About.” WKCR 89.9 FM, https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/about. Accessed 31 Jan. 2024.
4 OnAir · February 2024
landscape has often meant that we have had to place more emphasis on the latter half of the mission, as (proud) keepers of the flame. But in 1970—the year that marked the formal birth of the Jazz Department, and WKCR’s commitment to “the alternative”3—the station’s leaders weren’t looking to keep the flame so much as stoke it. When the first birthday broadcasts were proposed to the board in 1978, they took “a slight tilt towards living artists;” in fact, as Phil Schaap recounted in a 1992 interview, none other than “[John] Coltrane didn’t make the cut—you see, he was dead.”4 Their emphasis on musicians who were alive and working—which in ‘78 counted among their ranks Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Roy Eldridge5—was idealistic even for the time. The ‘golden age of jazz’ was already a cliché, and so was the fact that it was, by all accounts, long gone.6 “There was a jazz community that needed help,” Schaap remembered, and “radio [had] abandoned jazz.”7 Radio not only became a way to bring jazz to an audience, but also to bring an audience to the musicians. Later, Schaap would reflect:“I’ve been training musicians my whole life, but I can’t find ‘em gigs anymore—not unless we have audience 3. Spring, Evan. A History of WKCR’s Jazz Programming. Interview with Phil Schaap, 5 Oct. 1992, https://web.archive.org/web/20060222075049/http://www.columbia. edu/cu/wkcr/jazz/schaap.html. Columbia University Libraries, University Archives. 4. Spring. 5. Spring. 6. Kilgannon, Corey. “In a Life of Jazz, a Jarring Note.” The New York Times, 27 May 2001. NYTimes.com, https:// www.nytimes.com/2001/05/27/nyregion/in-a-life-ofjazz-a-jarring-note.html. 7 . Spring.
