Author: Jazz90.1

March 2025 Blog Post The Dollars and……Sense? – Part Two It’s no secret that Jazz90.1 gets by financially by “the skin of our teeth.” It has been this way since day one, and we’ve gotten quite good at stretching a penny. As retired morning host Joëlle VanBuren used to say, “we use both sides of…

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There’s quite a bit of buzz about the upcoming reissue of more than half the Strata-East catalog on the Mack Avenue label in late April. More than 30 Strata-East albums will be digitally released and four albums will be reissued on vinyl and CD:  Charles Tolliver and Music Inc’s Live at Slugs’ Vol. I & II Stanley Cowell’s Musa: Ancestral Streams…

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February 2025 The Dollars and……Sense? Last week, we learned that newly appointed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr will be investigating funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and PBS. His claim is that public radio and TV stations who are affiliated with both entities (and those entities themselves,) may be violating FCC regulations by airing commercials and…

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Nate Chinen (NY Times jazz columnist and author) posted an article recently, reflecting on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s short essay on jazz, written in 1964 for the first Berliner Jazz Festival (60 years later, it’s called Jazzfest Berlin).  King’s reflections on jazz are a concise marvel: It is no wonder that so much of the…

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There are so many new jazz labels these days releasing such a beautiful variety of jazz and improvised music. Most of these (relatively) new labels are continuing the tradition in creating a discernible aesthetic universe in their catalogs. Just as ECM and Blue Note immediately bring to mind a consistent sound, new labels like Pyroclastic,…

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Phil Freeman has an interesting write-up about the Black Artist Group (BAG) on the Shuffle app. Shuffle seems to have been set up by music critics and fans. It provides quick descriptions of musical genres, scenes and artists and provides links to recommended albums. You can quickly find yourself falling down one rabbit hole after another. Freeman’s…

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Ethan Iverson, the former pianist of The Bad Plus, is a prolific writer and his Substack blog, Transitional Technology, consistently illuminates critical aspects of the jazz world and provides thought provoking analysis. Highly recommended. Surprisingly however, his latest missive has been published in The Nation. The article, Jazz Off The Record, begins, “Sometime in the late 1960s…

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Happy New Year to one and all. When the clock struck midnight on December 31, I couldn’t help but look forward to the new year, while also reflecting on 2024. Last year, Jazz90.1 WGMC-FM celebrated a milestone that quite frankly – I wasn’t sure we’d would reach. We celebrated 50 years on the air. Through…

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