Martin Luther King, Jr on Jazz

He knows it's not the devil's music!

From remarks delivered at the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival (of all places)-

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.

This is triumphant music.

Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.

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Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for April 7, 2018

Here we are again, having taken a week off and still mostly throwing a show together at the last minute. The second set has a slightly diverse set marking the 50th anniversary of the the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including a couple of tracks recorded in the immediate aftermath of the event.



See the playlist after the break...

webcast info for March 31, 2018

We are out of town for the weekend, so today Unpopular Music will be presenting a rebroadcast of the April 1, 2017 episode. As I mentioned at the time, it's a typically diverse program - a bunch of white-guy jazz, a trans-century, multi-genre freeform set, and Fleetwood Mac.

As for the above,

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for March 24, 2018

Today's first hour kind of, but not completely jazzy, a little bit arbitrary, but none-the-less enjoyable. (I'm down on how it was put together, not how it came out) The second features some African influenced selections, followed by our traditional Stravinsky-channeling invocation of spring. The two halves of the second hour developed separately, and I was delighted while poking around the internet for Rite of Spring related material to find a track to join them.

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See the playlist after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for March 17, 2018

Happy Evacuation Day every one!! While celebrating the retreat of the British Army from Boston on March 17, 1776, we also mark the Ides of March and any other holidays that might be going on - when is Purim this year? (Tikva says it's come and gone already. Oh well), along with other non-holiday occasions with the usual slice of the infinite variety of music (a bit more poppy this week than usual) in unexpected combinations.

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(I think I made the assumption that you all know that Evacuation Day is a holiday in the city of Boston, created as making a saint's feast day a civic holiday goes against the US Constitution's first amendment prohibition against the government recognizing religion, a secular event occurring on March 17th has to be commemorated.)

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Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for March 10, 2018

Today we present the Unpopular Music Fourth Anniversary Not-Very-Special.  Pretty much a typical show, songs from albums and artists I play too often. Apologies to anyone with vivid memories of the January 31, 2015 episode for the repeated song.

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see the playlist after the break...

Random You Tube find - Alfred Schnittke's Concerto for Electric Instruments

I love Schnittke, but I'd never heard of this piece until I saw it in the Elitist Classical subreddit. Composed in 1960, but apparently unfinished (and otherwise unrecorded), it's more or less a concerto for theremin with the other instruments imitating an orchestra, more imitation than original electronic sounds. Nonetheless, an interesting listen.

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Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for March 3, 2018

After riding out the big storm yesterday, we celebrate the birthday's of your host and Robyn Hitchcock with a various yet jazzy selection of stimulating sounds.

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See the playlist after the break...

webcast info for February 24, 2018

As I am out of town this weekend, there will be no new Unpopular Music webcast, but instead a rerun of the January 21, 2017 episode. This episode actually reached the charts on Mixcloud, in the "alternative music" category, which seems fitting since even though I always use the "alternative music" tag as tongue-in-cheek irony, a radio program featuring two versions of Moon River is not particularly common.

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for February 17, 2018

A bit more arbitrary than usual, Let's hope this flows together.

And apologies to the other forty-three presidents (well, most of you), buy my last-minute, half-hearted search of my hard drive only came up with dedications to only two of you.

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See the playlist after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for February 10, 2018

A show with a typically jazzy first hour and freeform second hour. No grand theme or anything. A few from new acquisitions to the Unpopular Music library. A couple leftovers from recent digs into said library. One thing I picked up from David Byrne's "The Beautiful Shitholes" show on Mixcloud, which you should all check out (the middle third or so has some great Afro-pop selections.)

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See the playlist after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for February 3, 2018

Another chilly day in the Doug Ashford Radio Room, another sort of arbitrary selection of music.

I believe we hit all the stops on the jazz, contemporary classical avant-garde, off-the-beaten-path pop music train, Hopefully they'll all hang together.

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See the playlist after the break...

webcast info for January 27, 2018

We are out of town this weekend, so in place of a live webcaast, we have programmed to rerun the Thelonious Monk 100th Anniversary program in its stead.

I am a bit proud of this show, and have playing been tracks that didn't make the final cut (or had forgotten to include) ever since. Hopefully now I can shut up about it, and move on from it towards new triumphs the will deserve the royal we as well.

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for January 20, 2018

This week I took the time time to dig through a couple of boxes, looking to freshen up the old playlist. I came up with a few different things by folks I usually play, fresh enough I hope. There's a long Weirdo Dutch Jazz suite from the Willem Breuker Kolletief from a disc I forgot I had. There was also a Sonny Rollins collection I had forgotten about that had a track I wanted to use for my Monk centenary program. A disc from swingin' London of jazz interpretations of pop songs of the time that I'll eventually make you sick of. And, as they say, more!

Photo Credit: USFWS / Kydd Pollock (Creative Commons)

See the playlist after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for January 13, 2018

As the temperature plummets outside, some selections from across infinity to keep you warm. A somewhat scatter-shot collection, mostly jazz in the first hour, mostly not-jazz in the second.



The archive differs a bit from the webcast, mostly because I screwed something up in getting the recording off the BFR backup drive. So it's just the music, with no talking. No great loss as it was far from my best day as an announcer (plus a lot of noise from outside, too.) The show was basically in three sets, so I stuck in some electronic atmosphere to separate them. I moved the Duke track from the end to the beginning since it fits in that set better, and the Veloso track was from the BFR library and was just filling time anyway, so you won't miss that either.

See the playlist after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for January 6, 2018

Baby, it's cold outside, and it's not that warm in the Doug Ashford Radio Room either, but we are here with warming entertainment (and, honestly, to get out of the house for while.) We begin with New Year's greetings, and acknowledge the cold with songs. We also remember the great Roswell Rudd, the most amiable of avant-gardists, who died in late December.

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Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for December 30, 2017

From the frozen confines of the Doug Ashford Radio Room, we present a program largely made up of music Doug left behind on the BFR computer, assembled at the last minute to warm your souls. I'm having some problems with my computer, so I was assembling the show on the fly from the BFR library. I went for some of the basics, then filled in the gaps. Hope you enjoy.

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See the playlist after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for December 16, 2017

A very last minute production today, even more so than usual as of late. You may or may not appreciate that I've mostly (but not completely) ignored the upcoming holiday (or holidays) as I, myself, am not very jolly. (Can I qualify that sentence further? (or not))

 The second hour skews a bit towards difficult listening, but there are few festive numbers spread throughout. We continue our survey of Don Byron songs named after famous painters, and of Hal Willner tribute albums, plus a George Gershwin double-shot!

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See for yourself after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for December 9, 2017

An interesting show. Recorded during some snow that was really not worth mentioning (not that that stops me). There's an annual event called the Somerville Holiday Stroll (or something like that) that's supposed to bring people out here to Union Square, so there's Christmas music blaring from the Media Center out into the square, and probably bleeding onto the studio mic (most audible during the break around the 50-minute mark). However, it seems people are afraid of being caught in the snow like the Donner Party, so there's not much of a crowd. We did have the fire department stop by as the folks in the TV studio down the hall were using a fog machine and set off the fire alarm, but it was over before it got a chance to liven up a mic break.

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Music-wise we start out jazzy as usual, although some Latin weirdness emerges in the second set. The BFR computer once again cuts off Joe Albany's "Nearness of You". The second hour freeform set is book-ended with stuff from Hal Willner tribute albums - the Nino Rota one and another from the Monk one. There's some early and late 20th century classical music from Central Europe taking up a lot of space in between.

See for yourself after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music Webcast for December 2, 2017

A qualified disaster. A freeform if not unformed program, marred by technical problems, mostly fixed here. Wait for the parts you'll like, fix yourself a cup of tea during the rest.

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See the playlist after the break...