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Author: Emily Morrow

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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

WICN’s October Artist of the Month For forty years now, Pat Metheny has been the emblem and the model for one particular vision of jazz creativity.  It’s fresh and light, visionary, radio friendly, and unabashedly tech-savvy—in a way that not all jazz is comfortable with. Metheny is an unusual entry in the roster of jazz […]

WICN Artist of the Month: September 2020 Trombone Shorty. Is he, or is he ain’t a Jazz man? Many Jazz traditionalists might have something to say about that. Ask any music critic or millennial to name their favorite Jazz performers, and Trombone Shorty is often on the list. Could a child who formed his own […]

It’s difficult to represent the importance of Charlie Parker on the development of Jazz in a brief overview. To give his musical impact the weight it deserves, we would have to review Parker’s music for a couple of hours every single day—alongside a balanced diet of 90 minutes of Duke Ellington, an hour of Louis […]

Jazz fans sometimes have trouble connecting with the outside world on the matter of music, even with friends. Who is Eric Dolphy? Why can’t she just sing the melody? How do you follow this music? There’s seemingly no common ground to meet on. Jimmy Smith is often the solution to that problem: in among the […]

In 2020, we see Chick Corea as a Jazz veteran and a survivor.  Shortly we’ll celebrate the 60th anniversary of his first recordings, and we’ve already enjoyed more than fifty years of Corea compositions as an author in the new standard songbook in Jazz. Chick’s story started just down the road in Chelsea MA, where […]

Across the last 40 years, Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval has grown to be one of the great trumpet heroes of our time. Sandoval represents the bravura high-pressure, high-intensity, high-note tradition of Dizzy Gillespie—a virtuosic style that’s at its best when fueled by the high level of Sandoval’s creativity. This month you’ll hear him prance and […]

If a Mt. Rushmore existed for Jazz vocalists , who would be enshrined there? Surely the likenesses of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Anita O’Day. Many would also place our April Artist of the Month, Carmen McRae, there among the best and most influential singers that Jazz has ever encountered. Let’s consider why. Carmen McRae […]