To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In response to Mark Ruffin’s impassioned diatribe about jazz, WNUA, commercial popularity, and me (published in the November 12 Letters column), I need to start with a brief apology. As Ruffin points out, I am indeed aware of the presence of some “acoustic” and/or “mainstream” jazz on WNUA — particularly the program hosted by Ramsey Lewis, on which I have been a guest (at the invitation of Mark Ruffin, that program’s producer). In fact, upon reading my own remarks in the Culture Club article about jazz radio in Chicago, I felt a distinct wince, because I indeed should have excepted Ramsey Lewis’s program and one or two others from my general characterization of WNUA as a faux-jazz station. It was an oversight. But beyond that, a few of Ruffin’s points require clarification or correction.
Third, I don’t believe that Ruffin’s characterization of WBEZ as being prissily divorced from the thrust of today’s jazz can be borne out by our music log. A typical broadcast–last Wednesday, November 10, between 8 PM and 3 AM–included popular new recordings by Shirley Horn (in a vocal tribute to Ray Charles) and Paul Wertico (of the Pat Metheny Group), modern jazz stars T.S. Monk and Eliane Elias, the Panamanian steel-drum player Othello Molineaux, and the new-music pianist Myra Melford–in addition to historically significant giants Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, and Duke Ellington.
