Blog
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To look at the career outline of Greg Abate, you’d get the sense that the art form of Jazz is riding as high as ever. He’s making songbook albums, concept records, live albums in Monterey and other swell spots; Christmas albums(!); summit meetings with his idols; guest appearances with newcomers…Abate checks all the boxes. Greg […]
What brought you to hosting a show on WICN? Why do you love being on the air? I am a longtime listener of WICN. I had recently retired from teaching high school Biology and was helping on the family farm in southern Illinois when I got a call from my cousin Mauro DePasquale, asking if I […]
What brought you to hosting a show on WICN? Why do you love being on the air? I first became aware of WICN in the late ‘70s, when I was about 3 years old (Editor’s note: Ed is joking). My mother was an ardent fan of the station and had it on from morning till […]
What brought you to hosting a show on WICN? Why do you love being on the air? I am passionate about jazz, especially new material. I believe that jazz does not survive without nurturing the work of living artists, and that is one of my goals for the Sunday Jazz Brunch. If I can do […]
What brought you to hosting a show on WICN? I began listening to WICN in 1983 and became a member. After retiring from the automobile world in 1998, I heard Gene Petit asking for a volunteer on-air host. I entered a training program for a month and had my first one-hour show on Fridays beginning […]
February’s attention to African-American Heritage Month takes the form of declaring bandleader Jimmie Lunceford as our Artist of the Month. Lunceford was a starring figure in the Swing Era as the leader of a self-made, hard-working big band. Lunceford’s band was HUGE in its time (1933–47), especially among black audiences, but also with the general […]
By: Veer Mudambi Worcester Magazine “When I was a kid,” said David Ginsburg, Worcester resident, and radio host, “there was a definite sense of Worcester being jealous of Boston — wanting to be a big city and not really getting there.” Over the years, like an awkward teenager following in the footsteps of a famous […]
It’s always the right time to circle back to the majestic and poignant artistry of Shirley Horn, WICN’s Artist of the Month for January. The knowing way she delivers a song is a comfort and a lesson all at once. Horn’s been gone for fifteen years now, but her voice certainly was a special sort […]
Thankfully, guitarist Django Reinhardt has not fallen out of our 21st Century Jazz universe, though he’s been gone almost seventy years. That owes partly to the simple fact that his instrument remains ubiquitous in fields beyond Jazz: A musician with the chops that Django had will always be a marvel. Reinhardt also was a good […]
2020 is a time of heightened consciousness about “diversity inclusiveness.” That’s not wrong. Even in the seemingly open-minded field of Jazz, so-called minority players are routinely edged out, and programming decisions must be attentive—rightly—to redress those exclusions. The reason this is worth talking about for November’s WICN artist of the month, Mary Lou Williams, is […]