Learning about this music in the early 70s in greater Boston was, in retrospect, an unusual and happy coincidence for me. A friend handed me Volunteered Slavery from Rahsaan Roland Kirk and I was good to go. I got so much of my basic sense of the idiom from FM radio.
It is important to note that FM back then was an exotic and mysterious thing for audiophiles and classical music. We were still mainly an AM top 40 culture where a cheap transistor radio was our counterpart to an I pod.
We listened avidly as goofy early teens poring over little listings pamphlets we found in the down town Reading music store Pampalones. We argued the merits of the Buckinghams over the Box Tops and so on. Album oriented music was off on the horizon. It was all about singles, kind of like now.
My first FM radio was some scavenged thing and before long I figured out how to find jazz on it. NPR barely existed. WBUR at Boston University carried feeds from New York of Ed Beach with his earnest clipped speech as he raced through sequences of what I would come to know as hard bop with sorties off as far back as Charlie Parker.
Ed would yammer away with his idiosyncratic descriptions of, say, an Art Blakey tune as if he were doing coverage of a basketball game. We had no idea what he was talking about but his enthusiasm was a hoot and the music sounded great, some well spring of American exuberance that wasn't present in the carefully crafted pop tunes.
There was also the kindly and astute efforts of Steve Elman, a cool local who favored George Russell for excellent reasons and made sure listeners were in on it. He covered the vivid churning of the time with all the strands heading into the weaving, free jazz and early glimmers of fusion generally beginning with the then recent 60s.
That's where I'd learn about Tony Williams and Sam Rivers. There were several advocate show hosts then, each with compelling areas to illuminate.
Then there was Eric.
Eric Jackson was in the oddest of all experiments. A floundering classical station, WBCN, had nothing much to lose so they began to introduce various flavors of free form, always with an ear to sound flow. It was a gaggle of middle class suburban boomer hipsters engrossed in indicating what was out there in many forms of music with emerging rock as the cement to bind it.
Eric had the overnight and his slot was given to the creative churning underway in African America at the time, a pretty mysterious world out in little right wing Reading where a minor tizzy accompanied the purchase of a home by Celtics great Bill Russell.
Eric knew flow better than any of his counterparts in the day shifts. African America was fresh from momentous outcomes in the Civil Rights struggle and there was an air of hopeful playfulness and experimentation in all the various African Diaspora forms, RnB, Jazz, Blues and so on.
Earth, Wind and Fire worked with the Art Ensemble and Linda Lewis would suddenly rise after a long intense airing of Coltrane's Ascension like sun crepuscules that follow the departure of a summer thunder crescendo. Eric made staying up all night in wretched Reading actually worth it and I am a life long day person.
Before long, boomer demographic clout made FM radio big business and actually important, utterly ruining it. Media packaging experts took over and increasingly anxious homogenization settled in for a long stifling stay. Eric found a home at the prestigious public radio venue WGBH where he kept his faith with his origins within the constraints dictated by all this importance.
JazzBoston is making recognition of this long haul one of its priorities this year and his community of artists and friends will gather for an all-star jazz jam presented by JazzBoston and Scullers Jazz Club and produced by Fred Taylor on Monday, May 2. The event will be free with an option to make a charitable donation.
Included, among many others, will be Walter Beasley, Grace Kelly, Terri Lyne Carrington, Cecil McBee, Rebecca Parris, Phil Wilson, Bill Pierce, George Garzone, Bob Moses, Dominique Eade, Donal Fox, and Laszlo Gardony.
It is important to note that FM back then was an exotic and mysterious thing for audiophiles and classical music. We were still mainly an AM top 40 culture where a cheap transistor radio was our counterpart to an I pod.
We listened avidly as goofy early teens poring over little listings pamphlets we found in the down town Reading music store Pampalones. We argued the merits of the Buckinghams over the Box Tops and so on. Album oriented music was off on the horizon. It was all about singles, kind of like now.
My first FM radio was some scavenged thing and before long I figured out how to find jazz on it. NPR barely existed. WBUR at Boston University carried feeds from New York of Ed Beach with his earnest clipped speech as he raced through sequences of what I would come to know as hard bop with sorties off as far back as Charlie Parker.
Ed would yammer away with his idiosyncratic descriptions of, say, an Art Blakey tune as if he were doing coverage of a basketball game. We had no idea what he was talking about but his enthusiasm was a hoot and the music sounded great, some well spring of American exuberance that wasn't present in the carefully crafted pop tunes.
There was also the kindly and astute efforts of Steve Elman, a cool local who favored George Russell for excellent reasons and made sure listeners were in on it. He covered the vivid churning of the time with all the strands heading into the weaving, free jazz and early glimmers of fusion generally beginning with the then recent 60s.
That's where I'd learn about Tony Williams and Sam Rivers. There were several advocate show hosts then, each with compelling areas to illuminate.
Then there was Eric.
Eric Jackson was in the oddest of all experiments. A floundering classical station, WBCN, had nothing much to lose so they began to introduce various flavors of free form, always with an ear to sound flow. It was a gaggle of middle class suburban boomer hipsters engrossed in indicating what was out there in many forms of music with emerging rock as the cement to bind it.
Eric had the overnight and his slot was given to the creative churning underway in African America at the time, a pretty mysterious world out in little right wing Reading where a minor tizzy accompanied the purchase of a home by Celtics great Bill Russell.
Eric knew flow better than any of his counterparts in the day shifts. African America was fresh from momentous outcomes in the Civil Rights struggle and there was an air of hopeful playfulness and experimentation in all the various African Diaspora forms, RnB, Jazz, Blues and so on.
Earth, Wind and Fire worked with the Art Ensemble and Linda Lewis would suddenly rise after a long intense airing of Coltrane's Ascension like sun crepuscules that follow the departure of a summer thunder crescendo. Eric made staying up all night in wretched Reading actually worth it and I am a life long day person.
Before long, boomer demographic clout made FM radio big business and actually important, utterly ruining it. Media packaging experts took over and increasingly anxious homogenization settled in for a long stifling stay. Eric found a home at the prestigious public radio venue WGBH where he kept his faith with his origins within the constraints dictated by all this importance.
JazzBoston is making recognition of this long haul one of its priorities this year and his community of artists and friends will gather for an all-star jazz jam presented by JazzBoston and Scullers Jazz Club and produced by Fred Taylor on Monday, May 2. The event will be free with an option to make a charitable donation.
Included, among many others, will be Walter Beasley, Grace Kelly, Terri Lyne Carrington, Cecil McBee, Rebecca Parris, Phil Wilson, Bill Pierce, George Garzone, Bob Moses, Dominique Eade, Donal Fox, and Laszlo Gardony.
