Interview with Sam Seliger

by Ale Díaz-Pizarro

Why don’t we start by introducing yourself and telling me what your roles were at WKCR?Sure. I'm Sam Seliger. I've graduated now, but when I was a student, I was the American Department Head, 2020–2021. Then, I was Program Director until February 2023, and then I was Librarian and Archivist until April or May of this year.

Out of all of the positions you've held, what has been your favorite one? How has your KCR experience been colored by these roles? Well, those are two pretty different questions. It's hard to pick a favorite. I think they were all different, and my experience of each position was definitely shaped by the other things that I was doing and everything else that was happening at the station at the time. So, when I was American Head, I had a lot of freedom to just sort of do whatever I wanted, because the real need was just live programming. Can we do programming? Can we do as much of it as we can? And, you know, there were really no hurdles. Honestly, there was really not enough bureaucratic infrastructure at the station at that point in time, so there was definitely some trial and error there. There's a lot of things that, because I only had the position for five or six months, I wish I could have done better, but it was an important learning experience. And then, being Program Director was very different, as was being Librarian. In retrospect, I think I enjoyed all of them a lot. Although at different points in time, Program Director felt very, very stressful, it was also very rewarding, and I learned a lot. And I'm proud of the things that the station accomplished, and knowing that what I did as Program Director helped set a tone, or sort of make those future things possible.

What are you proudest of at KCR?It's really hard to pick a single thing that I'm proudest of. There’s a couple different ways of thinking about it. As a programmer—which is at the heart of everything—there's a couple shows that I'm most proud of. There's a sort of free/spiritual jazz show on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that I did earlier this year that I was really proud of because I put in a lot more preparation than I normally do for an Out to Lunch. I was really hoping I could make an open-ended experience that was relatively powerful, and in doing the show, I definitely felt that. Another one would be a Tuesday’s Just as Bad show on T-Bone Walker that I did a couple years ago. That was just a good show to do, and it was one of those where I really just got to play a lot of good music, but also make something out of it rather than just playing it. I'm sure there's a number of other regular shows without a specific theme that should be up there.

I'll go on a little digression here, but: I find it really interesting that I asked you what you were proudest of at KCR, and you immediately went to your shows as a programmer rather than big institutional actions. You mentioned programming is at the heart of everything for you, and that makes me wonder why you joined WKCR.I will say that I did have other kinds of answers! But it’s still telling that in my favorite things— with what I'm most proud of—programming comes first. This is an answer that I don't love giving, but I [joined KCR] because my dad did it. I’d always grown up hearing about my dad's experience [as a WKCR host], but I’m not even sure if my dad realized quite how much it colored my experiences of growing up and listening to music and becoming very serious about it. My path to KCR was a little bit different than his, but the awareness of a space on campus with this kind of culture was part of what brought me to Columbia in the first place. As soon as I found out that KCR was an option, I knew that I wanted to do it.

Obviously, the station looks super different from when your dad was working here. But what are some changes you’ve seen at the station from when you joined all the way to now?I think it's changed less than people on the inside might expect. There wasn't much of a before for me in the first place because I joined during the pandemic, which was a point when things were going quite badly. So I think the station’s become a lot more stable, though it's really easy for us to overlook the positive changes that have happened, and how smoothly—by and large—everything runs now. I think that some of the station’s priorities have changed, but not that much; I think we just found a new manifestation of an older thing that the station’s had for a long time. The station's always actually been quite pluralist, and I do think that's still the case. You might not be able to map the administrative organization of the station the same way it did 20 or 30 years ago, but if you were to show up at the station and look for your spiritual jazz people, your bebop people, or your modernist American classical people, you're still going to easily find camps like that.

What kind of person do you think you are? You mentioned, you know, your modern American classical, your spiritual jazz… I guess, among the cliques, I definitely fall into the free jazz, or post-fusion jazz [group]. We all have our different ways of going about the shows, but that certainly feels like one family of programming. I don't think there's really like an early blues clique at the station. There have been at different points, but it's probably for the better that it’s not a clique—[it’s not a] sensibility that needs to be resuscitated.

Why not?It’s one that's always been just for a certain type of white guy who really prioritizes their kind of obscure knowledge over everything else. I love that kind of music as much as anyone, but I want to stay pretty far away from that kind of tendency because it has its hostility in common with that old-school-white-guy-injazz tendency, that “this is only for people who know everything,” and prioritization of the most obscure.

So you don't think that's what WKCR is about. No, I don't think it is.

So what is KCR about to you?It’s about a lot of different things. Again, it's pluralist; it's hard to put into words. I feel like there are things that unify most of what we do— I'm not sure there's one thing that unifies all we do, but there's a handful of tendencies that make us unique. One thing you could say KCR is about is doing professional radio at a college radio station, a kind of professional radio that does still exist—we sometimes forget it does— but doesn't hold the level of importance that it once did in media. We don't think about what we do in the way that “college radio” (as an entity, a tradition, a genre) does. That kind of approach—the college radio approach of “well, I don't really know what I'm doing, but here's some songs that I like”—is probably the thing that would most unify the station, in its opposition.

We've talked about where KCR is now vs. where and why you started. What's next for you, now that you've graduated and won't be at KCR as a student programmer anymore?Right now I am at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, doing an internship in the Archives Center. This is my first time working in an archive designed specifically for external researchers, and it requires a lot of boring, bureaucratic work. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff—the Ellington papers are awesome, I'm getting my hands on those all the time. But once that's done, I'm not sure. I've been applying to jobs, hoping to do something in archives.

As we get into the end here, what has KCR given you? How are you a different person because you were at KCR?You know, it's interesting: I almost feel like it was such a totalizing experience that I am completely unaware of it. I have absolutely no idea how to answer that question, and I know it's not because it didn't do anything. It's certainly not that—I spent so much time there. But being out in the world, I can definitely feel some of the WKCR things with me, especially in this specific professional world that I'm trying to make my way into. KCR shaped my framework: what I do, and who I am.

I can try to phrase that in a more easily answerable way, or a little differently. What are you going to miss the most about WKCR? I'm going to miss being on the air. Oh, I can still do shows remotely, but I never loved doing it. I will be keeping an eye out for other opportunities in independent or community radio, but it might be a little hard, honestly, to find a place where you can be taken seriously and reach an audience of similar size or larger. With most other independent radio stations in the US, you won't get that: being on the air and the fact that you're on the air playing physical media. And there’s also the fact that both you and the listeners are coming with a specific set of expectations shaped by the history of the institution. It's definitely a little bit of pressure, sometimes a lot, but it's a special thing. People listen to you in a special way, and you get to program with that awareness. That's really something. And you know, of course, I’ll really miss this actual community of people at the station, although that's not something you lose—I'm still a part of it. It doesn't go away. I'll miss immediate, personal access and the physical being there, for sure. But that's not something that's gone.

During his time at WKCR, Sam was the long-time recurring host of the pre-war blues show Tuesday's Just as Bad, airing every week from 11:30pm on Tuesday evenings to 1:00am on Wednesday mornings.

Art by Tanvi Krishnamurthy.