Recently in Radio Category

Georg drove me over to the station this afternoon. The roads were starting to clear, though still icy in spots especially in shade. Still, we made it over without incident. Super early too, as we had left enough time to push the car out of a ditch if necessary.

I played a little over an hour of songs about snow, which was a lot of fun. Here's the playlist. Several of the songs I played are associated with Christmas, although they never mention the holiday. Like "Let It Snow" or "Marshmallow World." The songs are about cold weather, and it's kind of a shame that no one ever plays them after Christmas. I did play one song that explicitly says Christmas: "Snowy White Snow and Jingle Bells." I couldn't resist, I love that song so much.

I had all the snow songs on one CD, which totally felt like cheating -- just sitting there letting the CD play out, and hitting "advance" if there was a gap between tracks -- but it was a good thing because one of the CD players was broken and the computing guy came in during my show to fix it. Doing my show with only 2 CD players is hard enough, add someone working on the CD player at the same time and it would have been ridiculous.

On the way home we had to take the long way around -- head up Hillsborough Rd away from town, go to Sparger and double back -- because during the afternoon some idiot had lost control and driven into a telephone pole. The wires were down and Cole Mill was completely blocked. The road wasn't that bad; they must have been driving really fast to hit the pole that hard. Thanks a lot, idiot.

I'm terrible at self-promotion. So bad that when the station asked specialty DJs to contact them about promotional flyers -- in full color, which they are going to hang, no effort required on our part -- I didn't respond. Because they're going to hang the flyers on campus, and I thought they should focus on shows that would appeal more to students.

Well programming contacted me & asked me to do a flyer, so I did. I think it turned out pretty good!

I almost bought a new font, but good sense prevailed and I realized the retro fonts I already have are still perfectly good. I still kind of wish I had bought it. Mmm, new font.

I think the show today went well! Surprisingly so considering how ill-prepared I was. All I did beforehand was make a list of all the theme shows & events from 2009, then made sure I had all the CDRs I'd made for those shows in my case. During the show today I just pulled up the flowsheets for all those shows, and picked out the songs I wanted to play. These were the theme shows I covered this afternoon:

• January: memorial tribute to Eartha Kitt
• January: interview with Sammy Davis impersonator
• January: "Latin a la Lounge" all Latin music
• February: memorial tribute to Blossom Dearie
• February: birthday tribute to Harold Arlen
• April: "Jungle Madness" all lounge/exotica
• May: birthday tribute to Bing Crosby
• May: Memorial Day
• June: birthday tribute to Richard Rodgers
• August: memorial tribute to Les Paul
• September: birthday tribute to Mel Torme
• October: "Let's Misbehave" all sweet dance band music
• November: birthday tribute to Hoagy Carmichael
• November: birthday tribute to Billy Strayhorn

The only themes I skipped today were the July 4th and Christmas shows, which I do every year. Ahh! I just remembered that I was going to promote 2010 and mention all the great theme shows I have planned for the upcoming year, and I totally forgot. Dang.

It's going to be a good year too, with theme shows for Valentine's Day, July 4, Halloween, and Christmas, plus birthday tributes to Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Dinah Washington, George Gershwin and Frank Sinatra. Plus I'm working on an interview with a lady who attended Duke in the 1940s and sang with Perry Como in the Duke Chapel. I hope that works out!

Due to a last minute scheduling issue (namely, the DJ before me is stuck out of town) I will be doing a four hour Divaville Lounge tomorrow. Noon to 4 pm. I may be a bit loopy by the end so who knows what will happen. 88.7 fm if you're local, http://wxdu.org if you're not.

Just finished a tribute show all about Billy Strayhorn. (As usual, I forgot to mention it earlier today. Doh. At least I posted on Facebook.) It was a bit of a challenge to pull together, both due to issues I've written about already and some computer problems I've been having in the past week (the Mac with all the music on it suddenly decided to stop accepting CDs). Still, I think the show came together pretty well, and I don't think my frazzled feeling was apparent on the air. At least I hope not.

Strayhorn was a really interesting person and I highly recommend the book Lush Life by David Hajdu. Very well written, I felt like he did a great job of describing a complex person with sympathy.

Now I am so very, very glad that my marathon radio month (2 tribute shows a week apart!) is over. I haven't figured out yet what I'm going to do about Christmas -- usually I do an extra-long Christmas music show, but this year Christmas comes late in the week so my last show before the holiday is five days before. Maybe I'll just do the regular 2 hour show and not make a big deal about it this year. I think I'm not going to schedule any theme shows in January either. I'm always glad to do them, but there's so much research and planning and pressure to choose the right songs and say the right things, especially when it's a tribute to a person, that it ends up a bit exhausting. I need a couple of months off, to just have fun and play music in my show.

I've been looking at the 2010 calendar and there are some fun shows coming up next year -- Valentine's Day is on a Sunday, as is Halloween, also the birthdays of Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman and George Gershwin. Thankfully none of those are in January.

Really tonight I should work on the Divaville Lounge show website. I had been keeping it on an old version of Movable Type -- the only site still running on that old version -- because I used a special plugin to manage the dates. It would display "today's show," "last week's show," "next week's show" and the 6 upcoming shows -- in other words, it would display shows starting with tomorrow (the day after one viewed the page, that is) and ending 6 weeks in the future. And the home page rebuilt itself every night, so the relative dates were always correct. It was set up exactly the way I wanted.

Well, a couple of weeks ago my host upgraded my server and now this old version of MT doesn't work anymore. I couldn't add shows or edit the ones that were already there. And that essential plugin doesn't work with the new Movable Type. So I have to write my own code to handle all those relative dates. Kind of frustrating, I can't possibly be the only person who was using that plugin. I've got "today's show" and "all shows in the future" (which I can live with instead of the 6 upcoming shows, if I have to). Have not yet been able to get "last week's show" and "next week's show" to display. So I ought to work on that tonight. Probably won't.

Continuing work on the Hoagy Carmichael and Billy Strayhorn tribute shows. Usually I would only work on one show at a time, because usually I would only do one a month at most. Carmichael and Strayhorn, how dare you have birthdays exactly one week apart? They're happening on the Sunday before and after Thanksgiving, and I don't expect to have much time during Thanksgiving week, so they both have to be completely planned out before the 22nd.

I finished the Carmichael book (which was written in an insufferable style -- he used the word peripatetic twice in the first 20 pages! but chock full of good information), watched a terrible movie about him, and ordered a box set that sounds terrific. I can't wait for it to arrive. It has lots of early recordings, some of which are rare. I also put the movie To Have and Have Not in my queue because I want to play that clip of him chatting with and playing for Lauren Bacall.

I'm about halfway through the Billy Strayhorn bio, which is fantastic. I had no idea Strayhorn was such an interesting person. (It's called Lush Life and I highly recommend it.) I also ordered another book, Something to Live For, that was sort of a musical biography, and I'm embarrassed to admit that it's too technical for me. I don't even read music, and I just can't follow it. I got it used from Amazon Marketplace and based on a sticker on the jacket, I think it was used as a textbook in a music theory class at NYU.

Something to Live For was still worth it (especially at used prices) for the appendices: one lists every song Strayhorn ever wrote or cowrote, and how they were copyrighted. Another lists every song Strayhorn ever arranged that he didn't write, and when it was first recorded. It's invaluable information for preparing this show. It's been a challenge because first of all, Strayhorn's impact is harder to get at. It's easy to find a list of every song Hoagy Carmichael ever wrote. Much harder with Billy Strayhorn, who didn't get songwriting credit for many of the songs he wrote, and influenced many other songs with his arrangements. Secondly, Strayhorn is much more jazz than what I normally play. I normally don't play instrumentals at all, just under talksets, and most of Strayhorn's work was instrumental. So it will be a departure from my normal shows. I hope the listeners won't mind.

This afternoon was my show, which I think sounded fine on the air, but was much more stressful than usual. It's always fast paced because the songs are all so short. And I was kind of tired & was doing everything more slowly than usual. I knew I was feeling out of it when I couldn't find a CD on the shelf and then realized I was looking for When Love Goes Wrong under H! What's that about?

Then late in the show I got a comment about the distinction between hot jazz & sweet bands, and I decided it would be good to play a hot and sweet version of the same song. Which I probably should have done during the sweet band show two weeks ago, but better late than never! Unfortunately I was dawdling about picking out the songs, then suddenly realized I had 20 seconds before the current song ended, nothing cued up and no idea what I was going to play next. Holy crap! I managed to get something into the CD player with only a brief moment dead air, I would guess less than a second. (Then again, a full second of dead air is a really long time. I'll have to listen to the archive and see how it sounds.) I don't know if anyone even noticed but it really threw me off. It's hard to recover from that kind of blind screaming panic. It stressed me out so much that I took a nap when I got home.

After dinner I started working on planning the two tribute shows I have scheduled for November: Hoagy Carmichael and Billy Strayhorn. They both have birthdays on Sundays, only a week apart, and Thanksgiving in between! So I need to have both shows completely planned out in advance. Tonight I got the songs pretty much picked out for the Carmichael show and got started on sequencing. I ordered one CD for each show and put a couple of movies in my netflix queue. (I use Audio Hijack Pro and Audacity to extract songs from movies, turn them into audio files, then burn them to CD. It's been really helpful for these theme shows when I sometimes want to play songs from movies that are hard to find on CD.)

The best news is that the library has good bios of both Carmichael and Strayhorn. If it's not too rainy I'll go check them out tomorrow. I also ordered a book about Strayhorn's music. Probably overkill, but Amazon Marketplace had a used copy for $5.50 including shipping which I just couldn't pass up. So I think I'm in pretty good shape, at least I've made a good start.

Had a fun show this afternoon. Which, as usual, I forgot to mention in advance. I played a few back requests which had been made in previous shows, but I hadn't been able to fill at the time. The best one was the most interesting request I've ever gotten: for songs about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. That one totally stumped me when it came in a couple of weeks ago. I thought it over, did some searching and managed to put together a whole set of Flying Spaghetti Monster music:

• "Flying Home" Charlie Barnet Orchestra
• "Come Fly With Me" Frank Sinatra
• "Cock-a-Doodle, I'm Off My Noodle" Harry Reser and the Six Jumping Jacks
• "Spaghetti Rag" the Light Crust Doughboys
• "That's Amore" Dean Martin
• "One Meatball" Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters
• "Meatballs" Ken Nordine
• "C is for Cookie" Cookie Monster
• "Someone to Watch Over Me" George Gershwin

"Cock-a-Doodle, I'm Off My Noodle" was the most fun discovery, a hilarious novelty song from the 1920s. The most hilarious part was that iTunes music store euphemized the title as "C**k-a-Doodle, I'm Off My Noodle." No, I'm not kidding. Thank you iTunes, for protecting me from such dangerous language.

I've noticed that when I have a project in Audacity, I can never stop fiddling with it. It's a good thing my show has a set time or I'd never stop editing. Speaking of which, I redid those promos. I decided they were too long & aimed for 30 seconds max. With some ... fiddling, I managed to shave 10-15 sec off each of them. Now they're 19 sec and 35 sec which isn't bad.

My inclination was to lie around all day today recovering from yesterday's drive home. But I wanted to feel like I was accomplishing something. Luckily the programming director had asked all the specialty show DJs to make short promos for our shows. That sounds like fun!

The weird thing about my show is that it's kind of hard to define. Basically I play jazz and pop vocalists from the 1920s through the early 1960s. Not a very catchy slogan, is it? I tried a couple of different approaches, using different music for each.

I had actually been thinking about doing something like this for a long time, because I want an intro that I could play at the beginning of every show. Something like you hear to introduce those old time radio shows. The stumbling block is finding someone who's good at voices and could sound like a radio announcer from the 1940s. (If you are such a person and you're willing to be recorded for the beginning of my show, please email me!)

Clutter can be a pain (and people who treat any level of clutter as a sign of either moral failure or a mental disorder can be a real pain). And sometimes it can be a joy, like when you discover something you really want and/or need, and forgot you had.

Case in point: I wanted to do a tribute to Les Paul on tomorrow's show, but I only have one CD. Turns out the station has none. (By the way, how can that be? We have a weekly rotating show devoted to guitar rock and there's no Les Paul in the entire library?)

D. suggested searching Youtube for Les Paul tracks that weren't too rock, and using Audio Hijack Pro to get them into a format I could use on the radio. I was thinking I'd have to do that tomorrow. In the meantime I wanted to get some work done this evening. For no particular reason I decided to play one of those old time radio CDs I bought a couple of months ago. Went through the stack and discovered a CD of the Les Paul Radio Show! I had gotten the CD just because I needed one more CD to get the quantity discount, and had forgotten all about it until just now.

It's a great CD. Good sound quality and terrific performances by Paul and his wife Mary Ford. There are over 20 episodes of their show, plus tons of guest appearances on other shows. The tribute tomorrow is on!

My two interview shows about WWII are online as podcasts!
Click here for the 25 May 2008 interview with Derick Ovenall.
Click here for the 1 June 2008 interview with Giuseppe Bucca.

Or you can go to the iTunes Music Store and search for "derick ovenall", "giuseppe bucca" or "divavillelounge". (is that not cool!) Note: these podcasts include only the interview portion of the program, no music. Due to licensing issues, WXDU cannot podcast programs containing copyrighted music.

The show this afternoon went great, if I do say so. The phone rang like crazy. I had 12 requests, and a couple of the callers didn't even make requests! (To be fair, most of the requests came over the website. Still, there were a lot of phone calls.) I prefer it this way. It's more hectic, and also more fun and energizing. I talked again to the fellow who told me the Andrews Sisters were Afro-Cuban. This time it was clear that he was joking with me and never expected me to take it seriously. I was playing Wayne Newton and he told me that Wayne Newton is really K.D. Lang. Which is pretty funny, the young Wayne Newton does kind of look like K.D. Lang. I shot back "Did you know that Louis Armstrong was Irish? I thought you should know that." Then he told me that Condi Rice is really Morgan Freeman in drag! I'm really glad he called back after that other time. Now I know he was sharing a joke with me, not having a joke at my expense.

After the show this evening, I started working on audio editing for next week's "dad divaville lounge." My clients who work in radio recommended Peak, and I want to download the demo and try it. If I can learn it well enough to use it effectively for this show, I'll buy it so I can use it for future interview shows. In the meantime I've got a much more limited audio editing program called Fission, which I bought for a few bucks because it was bundled with Audio Hijack Pro. It's working pretty well for the fundamental editing. This evening I broke the audio file into separate segments for each talkset, and then got started on editing the first segment. The main problem was that I must have had my headset turned down too low, as my voice was much quieter than my dad's. To my relief that was easy to fix. Then I trimmed out the "ums" and a few false starts on my part, things like that. Also I moved one chunk of dialogue to an earlier place where I thought it would sound better. I must admit, I felt pretty proud of myself for doing all of that. I think the first talkset is pretty much done, unless Peak turns out to be so much better at audio editing that it's worth doing over.

The one thing Fission is not able to do is multiple simultaneous tracks. I always play music under the talksets, and so of course I want to do the same with the interview. I could just do what I normally do, stick in a CD with instrumentals and hit play just before starting the dialogue on the air. But if I can tweak the music and the dialogue on the computer, I know I'll be able to make them sound better together. You know, time them out properly, occasionally pause the dialogue and bring up the music for a moment, things like that. Anyway, Fission can't do that and I'm really hoping Peak can.

This afternoon my dad and I recorded an interview for Divaville Lounge. He talked about when he first got interested in swing music and hot jazz, told stories about great concerts he saw back in the day, and introduced some of his favorite songs. I think it went well! I tried to strike the right note between maintaining a conversational tone, and letting Dad talk without interruption. He had notes to read from so that he wouldn't get stuck, and I think he did a good job of not sounding like he was reading a script.

The technical side worked out well. I didn't want to do the interview live because I thought it would just be too much stress. And I didn't know how much time the interview was going to take & wanted the ability to edit it if necessary. Most importantly, I have no idea if the instructions on how to patch in a phone call even work. (In fact, just a few days ago another dj reported that it doesn't work. Thank goodness I had already decided not to do that way!)

Instead my dad got set up on Skype, and we talked over our computers. The sound quality was much better than using a phone. I used Audio Hijack Pro to record the conversation. It's a terrific program which can be set to only record audio from a specific program, not any other source. Which was great because I didn't have to worry about accidently making my computer beep and that getting into the audio file. I used the highest quality setting for the recording, and the resulting file, for 45 minutes of audio, was 500 Mb!

At first it was strange, to be sitting at my computer reading PSAs and saying "You're listening to WXDU Durham" as if I was on the air. I joked to my dad that I needed to close my eyes and pretend I was standing in front of the board talking into the big mic. Still, I got used to it pretty quickly, and I think we both sounded comfortable. I have no experience with looking at printed dialogue and figuring out how long it will take when spoken, so I had no idea how we were going to do on time. As it turns out, we were pretty close to my goal. I'm going to time it out and make sure we have enough time to play all the songs we talked about. I'm hoping I won't have to cut anything.

I'm going to edit the interview over the next week, break it into tracks and put them on a CD. The show will air next Sunday, September 23. I hope everyone will tune in for my dad's on-air debut!

The massive indexing project is done! Whew, finally. There weren't as many loose albums left to add as I had thought a couple of days ago; mostly the time was in checking them all.

I think I am going to go ahead and write a simple web app to search the database online. The flat files have worked great, but this last big push has increased the flat file size to the point where it's hard to load the pages. (1.6 Mb each, to be precise.) It won't take long to write a simple search function, and then it will group the results better than the flat file could do.

Of course I'll still have to add new material as I buy it. Which I'm trying not to go nuts with, but to be honest I have been buying at least 1 new CD a week. My latest acquisition is ¡Sabroso! by Mongo Santamaria. He's more of a jazzman than a Divaville Lounge kind of guy, for instance he wrote "Afro Blue" and had a big hit with "Watermelon Man." But you know, it's from the right era, and I try not to be super rigid about defining the show, and I had heard a couple of excellent songs from ¡Sabroso! on that Internet radio station I like.

The CD only arrived last night and I haven't had a chance to listen to the whole thing yet. (I'm alone in the office this afternoon, and I wish I had thought to put it on my iPod!) What I've heard so far is fantastic. My rule of thumb is not to buy an album for just one song, no matter how good it is, if I haven't heard the rest. That's just too much of a risk -- if the rest of the album stinks, you could end up spending $15 or more for just one song. But 2 songs, if they're this good, and I've been humming them for weeks, and the album only costs $8? That's a bargain.

The two amazing songs, by the way, are "Que Maravilloso" and "Mambo de Cuco." Sylvia told me that "Mambo de Cuco" was probably named in honor of someone, likely one of the performers. The liner notes don't list anyone named Cuco. Maybe it's a nickname.

I think the show went well! The playlist is here in case anyone is interested.

It was a little shambolic behind the scenes, though Georg told me he couldn't tell by listening. I had a couple of flubs, the worst being I read the same PSA twice, and realized it in the middle of the second read-through. I probably should have just kept going, instead of stopping and saying "Wait, I've already read this one!" I would say I'll know better next time, but here's hoping there is no next time for that one.

It was great having Santa Salsera sit in on the show. She brought a good perspective to the theme, not to mention her incredible music collection, & had some really interesting things to say about the artists we played. I really hope we can do another Latin theme show like this in the future.

ETA: I forgot to mention the one annoying thing that happened: a long-time regular listener called, told me he was going to have to "educate" me, and tried to convince me, tried to get me to say on the air, that the Andrews Sisters were of Afro-Cuban descent. Excuse me, Afro-Cuban? I've seen their picture. At least try for something remotely plausible. But I guess tricking a dj into saying something stupid on the air seems funny, and I guess the more outrageous the dubious factoid, the funnier the prank. I'm just glad we have access to Google in the control room.

Note to self: from now on, check all information provided by listeners before repeating it on the air. Well, the Birthday Man (who writes in every week to let us know who had a birthday) seems knowledgeable and not mean enough to trick me. Everyone else, I will fact check.

(Santa Salsera and I did Google the Andrews Sisters and they are half Greek, half Norweigian.)

It's been a busy weekend, much more socializing than I'm used to. Yesterday I had lunch with Santa Salsera so we could chat about the Latin a la Lounge show. She has an amazing collection of LPs and she played a few choice examples for me. It was kind of funny how we value different things in midcentury music. For instance when she pulled out an album, made a face and said something to the effect that, this isn't any good, you won't be interested in this, only to have me exclaim with delight, "The Harmonicats? I love the Harmonicats!" The other example was Enoch Light and the Light Brigade's album of all cha chas, which she called it "unlistenable." Now I have to concede, I haven't actually heard the album and it might indeed be unlistenable. But the very idea of Enoch Light doing an all cha-cha album, to me that sounds like it just has to be good.

After lunch I drove out to Raleigh to see an old friend of mine who I haven't seen in ages. We had a very mellow afternoon. She brought her dog, an adorable Bichon named Tank, and we sat and hung out at an outdoor cafe downtown. Then we went to a neat little Italian market named Conti's, where I spent far too much money. The owner was really nice. He not only let my friend bring her dog inside, he even gave Tank a biscuit.

In just a few minutes we're going out to have dim sum with D. and S. Who are good at finding great restaurants, so I'm really looking forward to this. Then at 3 it's the Latin a la Lounge show, and we'll probably have dinner with Santa Salsera afterwards. I can't remember the last time I did so many social things in two days. Which is great, I'm not complaining! I just feel like I need a weekend to recover from my weekend.

August 16 movie: Roots of Rhythm. I confess this was a bit disappointing to me. It's a three part documentary narrated by Harry Belafonte about the history of Latin music. Actually it's about the history of Cuban music, but Belafonte consistently conflates the two. Which was the first problem for me. I want to learn about Cuban music, and I also want to learn about Brazilian music and Argentinian music and Mexican music. By talking about "Latin music" but only ever showing that of Cuba, this movie sort of implied that the others don't exist. I think the only non-Cuban musician they showed in the entire series was Carmen Miranda. She was given about a half-minute of one of her more ridiculous Hollywood numbers, and then dismissed as inauthentic.

My second problem was not really a problem with the movie in itself, more with my expectations. Because the reason why I rented the movie was research for the Latin a la Lounge show this weekend. Unfortunately, only the third part of the documentary was about Cuban music in the US. The first two parts were about the Spanish and African origins of Cuban music, and the history of music within Cuba.

There was about 45 minutes to cover 50 years of Cuban music in the US. Which is a big, big topic. There just wasn't time to go into any kind of detail. For instance, Mongo Santamaria is mentioned, but just in a list of musicians who are named once. Perez Prado was never even named. So, I didn't really learn anything.

Well no, that's not true. I learned about Anacaona, an all-female orchestra of 10 sisters who toured the US and Europe in the 30s. I learned that Desi Arnaz's father was the mayor of Santiago during the Machado regime, and that Arnaz introduced the conga to the US. I learned that Chano Pozo deserved co-songwriting credit for "Manteca" (whether he received it or not was unclear.)

Which is not to say this was a bad documentary. The first two parts created a wonderfully vivid portrait of a culture steeped in music. I probably would enjoy it more if I watched it another time, when I wasn't after specific information.

Many thanks to Lisa and Kevin for yesterday's excellent suggestion about flat files. It worked great! I just exported the db as a monstrous huge html table. Two actually, one sorted by song title and one by artist. Uploaded them both to my web server and loaded them up on the computer in the MCR at the beginning of the show. Once the pages were loaded, searching them was easy. The results weren't grouped as nicely as they would have been with a web app, but the search was fast enough that it didn't matter.

And thank goodness the suggestion came in time for yesterday's show. Searching the flat files let me fill a couple of requests that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. (Who knew I have two songs by Eddie Fisher?) The show went really well, if I do say so. Lots of requests, which keeps it fun. And I even got a nice email after the show from a listener, wow! I'm starting to feel more comfortable with the show & better able to handle the pace. I find Divaville Lounge more hectic than a regular playlist show because the songs are all so short. In a normal show, if you get behind you can always put on an eight minute song and get caught up. But in this format, almost all the songs are 2 1/2 minutes, and there are no really long songs. So you're always in a hurry to get the next song cued up. Still, I'm feeling much less harried as I get used to the pace.

Next week is a show I'm really looking forward to: Latin a la Lounge, a special theme show of Latin music. Over the weekend I made a list of potential music for the show. I have enough for about 5 shows, not even counting whatever cohost Santa Salsera will bring. Why not, it's good to have options!