WGBH’s Eric Jackson has truly been the voice of jazz in Boston for more than forty years. This year, Boston Jazz Week centers around a celebration of Eric’s four decades at the heart of the jazz scene in the Boston metro area.
Radio
Poetry Review: Two Chapbooks from Anton Yakovlev — Urban Alienation, Perfectly Pitched
Yakovlev’s poems speak to the reader quietly, with assumed familiarity.
Fuse News: How Loud Does David Koch’s Money Talk in Boston?
Mayer’s report deals with David Koch throwing his weight around at WNET and PBS. Unfortunately, she does not talk about whether Koch’s powerful presence has influenced WGBH.
Fuse News Review: Terry Gross’s Thrice-Told Tales
What has NPR’s Terry Gross learned after all these years of probing famous people’s psyches? “We are all mortal. Life is short, and for some life is full of pain.”
Book Review: The Boston Jazz Chronicles — Indispensible History
Richard Vacca’s The Boston Jazz Chronicles will be a foundational document that other researchers will turn to again and again as they delve into more specific niches of Boston jazz history and unearth as yet unknown artifacts of this era and its neglected body of music.
Fuse Arts Commentary: WGBH Damage Control — Lip Service for Jazz
The plans to serve the jazz community that WGBH offered to JazzBoston during the meeting, from an internet jazz station to making Eric Jackson more visible on the station’s talk shows, are only part and parcel of the strategic dithering, a cover for lowering standards and doing little.
Fuse Commentary: The Demise of Arts and Culture on WGBH — Hypocrisy in Plain Sight
Discard the empty rhetoric about “amplifying the arts,” follow the money and you will eventually find, winding your way through all the obfuscation and spin, WGBH’s thrifty corporate character.
Arts Interview: Jazz DJ Steve Schwartz Signs Off . . . But Swings On
According to former WGBH Jazz DJ Steve Schwartz, “In retrospect, the writing was on the wall. About a year and a half ago, our shows were cut by an hour; before that, we were told we could no longer use the names of our shows or our theme songs.”
Fuse Commentary: WGBH — No Excuses
WGBH is not even attempting to make any excuses, not bothering to put in the energy to explain why the station isn’t using funding from its supporters to hire first-class journalists or to create news programming that builds community and educates because it challenges, investigates, and digs deeper.
Fuse Update: Sunset for Weeknight Jazz at WGBH
July 11 update.The New Orleans-style funeral for jazz on WGBH radio was an amazing coming-together of musicians from across the spectrum of styles. It was an occasion for mourning the loss of Steve Schwartz and the diminution of Eric Jackson, to be sure, but it was also an occasion for celebrating with more than a little wonderment the recognition that we all are, indeed, a community.
