Flavian/Jazz

WNUR's annual Phoneathon fundraiser runs February 19-26 this year. Your support helps the all volunteer staff of WNUR bring you the kind of music you won't hear elswhere. Pledge online or by calling (847) 491-WNUR. There are plenty of fine premiums as thank you gifts for your support.

You know what, you know why; just do it!

Update, 2/27 — Thank you! Many of you called over the last week and donated; your support is greatly appreciated. You can now sit back and enjoy the next fifty-one weeks of WNUR programming knowing that you have done your part to keep us on the air.

Jennifer Waits (who, according to her profile, has been doing the college radio thing almost exactly as long as I have) has a blog, Spinning Indie, which covers college radio and independent music. She has an ongoing series of posts detailing her visits to college radio stations. I'm a little late to the party, but a few months ago she apparently visited WNUR, so those of you who want more views of the station and more details about the whole enterprise and where it fits in the pantheon of college radio can take a look.

I get a brief mention, and there's a reference to my musings on the station's old and new homes that I wrote a couple of years ago when we moved into our current studio.

For the first ten or so years of my tenure at WNUR DJs recorded the playlists for their shows in ratty spiral bound notebooks or three ring binders. When the notebooks were full, or at other random times, the old playlist would disappear and a new book would take its place. I'm not sure what happened to the old books; they may be filed away carefully in an archive somewhere, but knowing the station, this seems unlikely. More probably they are taking up space in some landfill or other. Eventually the station installed a computer in the control room and we started entering playlist information into a either a word processing document or a spreadsheet. There wasn't any great consistency, and every now and then a computer crash would take all the playlists with it.

Around 2002 things got a little better organized. The PC was added to the network and the playlists were saved more securely and they started standardizing the format. At about the same time I decided to put my playlists on-line here on my website in a nice easy to find and view format during my show. There was talk of putting them on the station's website too, but I decided not to wait for that. Eventually some of the playlists made it on-line at wnur.org either as rtf documents or simple html, but it was a manual process. It was all very messy and not very listener or DJ friendly, and was no reason for me to change how I was keeping my own playlists. There was talk of providing a nice web-based entry system; easier for the DJs and real-time information for the public, but nobody got as far as implementing it.

Fast forward to today -- finally there is an on-line real-time playlist system at WNUR! Not all DJs have got with the program yet, but for those that have, playlist information is showing up on the station's home page as the updates occur (with luck the time might actually match reality too!). There is also a way to pull up old shows by DJ, show, and date. I have started using the new system, so my playlists are showing up correctly on the WNUR home page, updated as I play each track -- much easier for anybody who has a question about what's on air.

What about this site? The short answer is that it's not going anywhere. One of the things that my playlist system has done for me for the last seven years is to give me the ability to search over all my old playlists. I really like this as it helps stop me from getting into ruts, playing the same few tunes over and over, and it reminds me of artists whom I might otherwise neglect -- too useful a featue to lose. So I have written a little script that copies the data from the new system onto my private site, so the two systems will continue in parallel for the foreseeable future. If you are used to coming here for the playlists there's no need to change your habits; for everybody else the station's website is an easy access point for my, and everybody else's, playlists.

WNUR is all student run and all the on air staff are volunteers -- students, alums (like me), and other hangers on from the local community. The only exception to this are the technical staff: the chief engineer and the technicians who maintain the transmitter and equipment work for Northwestern. Not surprisingly the FCC requires people who know what they are doing, and who have the licenses to prove it, handle the details of keeping the transmitter safe and legal. Since I started at the station Tony Tolnai has been the chief engineer (and much else besides); he actually started in 1985, the year before I came to WNUR, but as far as I'm concerned he has always been there as a benign guiding force. He has been in charge of keeping our old equipment functioning, and the planning of two new studios and the moves into them (see here for a little the story of the moves). Here's a brief, if somewhat out of date, profile of Dezso 'Tony' Tolnai , Director of Media Technology for Northwestern's School of Communication (or School of Speech as it was always known), and WNUR's long time chief engineer from the October 2002 edition of the Northwestern Observer Online.

Tony is retiring after serving us long and well; we'll miss him.

well, probably not to the day, but close. I realized a few days ago that the start of spring quarter at Northwestern marks the twentieth anniversary of my presence on the WNUR jazz show. I started as an apprentice in the spring, then had my own show by the summer; though there have been a few quarters over the intervening years when I didn't do a show, I have been a steady presence ever since. It has been great treat, and I have enjoyed it immensely.

I'm excited to start my third decade of WNUR jazz in the new studios. They are still tidying up the loose ends and fixing a few bugs, but it is already a treat to work in the new space. The picture may not make it seem that different from the old space, but the changes are immense. The inaugural/anniversary show featured old music, nothing recorded after 1987 -- indded a lot of old favorites going back to the twenties. Two and a half hours isn't really enough to even begin to hit the high spots, but it was good fun.

WNUR officially began broadcasting from Annie Mae Swift Hall May 5, 1950, and has remained there until now, first in the basement then, since 1995, in the McCoy Foundation Studios behind the auditorium on the first floor.

The old basement studio was pretty much the quintessential college radio station: almost entirely unsuitable space, nailed together two-by-fours for record shelving, ancient, flakey equipment and so on. I remember doing an interview with McCoy Tyner where we all had to huddle round a single microphone balanced on a chair, because we only had one working microphone at the time, and the way it was connected precluded using a normal stand. CDs were just becoming common when I started at the station, but we didn't have anywhere secure to keep them, so they lived in someone's dorm room and you had to make arrangements to go and get them the day before your show. Anything we recorded was on reel-to-reel tape and pre-recored announcements were on cartridges (physically the same as 8-track, but with specially recorded tones to cue and auto-stop)... Those were the days!

In the early nineties, after I had already been at the station for a few years, the McCoy Foundation gave the university some money to improve the facilities and new studios were built in a space that the station was using mostly for storage. The new facilities were a huge step up, both physically as the space was actually suitable for its use and included a small performance studio and news/interview studio, and in terms of the equipment. Proper storage for the record and CD collection (no more two-by-fours) was close at hand. It has been a nice place to operate from for the last dozen years.

A little while ago the university decided to totally renovate Annie Mae Swift, one of the campus's older buildings, and their plans required the space used by WNUR to be given to other uses. The process of finding a new home was fairly protracted; at one point they were going to move us to the basement of a different building, but it turned out that it was prone to flooding (water and expensive electronics do not mix well), and nobody wanted to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to fix the problem. Finally they decided to put us in some underused TV studio space in John J. Louis Hall, a generally much more satisfactory place for the station

Studio equipment has changed hugely over the last decade, with everything going fully digital. The new studio should be a great place, especially for the core of the station, the students, who need exposure to how things are done out in the real world. As for me, there will be fewer buttons to push, but now each of them does about 20 things so I should still be able to push the wrong one often enough to keep you all guessing.

They kindly asked me, as probably the longest continuously serving WNUR DJ still around, to come in and play the final recording and sign the old studio off the air for the last time. So after after almost 57 years in Annie Mae Swift I took the station of the air at 5:00 pm CDT March 27. About 21 hours later the youngest freshman DJ brought the station back on the air from its new location.

Composer, arranger, guitar player, and former WNUR DJ (back in the eighties) Charley Harrison stopped by the studio to chat. He was amazed at how nice the place was compared to our old studio in the basement, but it shows how long it is since his last visit as we have been upstairs for more than ten years and we are currently preparing to move to a studio in a different building.

Charley was in town for a concert at Raviania with the Chicago Jazz Orchestra. He also dropped off a copy of his new CD, Keeping My Composure, also with the the CJO and others (Freddy Cole, Kurt Elling, Cedar Walton...). It was good to see him after so long, and I look forward to playing more of the album over the coming weeks.