Saturday, January 24, 2009

Whither the NPR Jazz Profiles Podcast?

WTF? I absolutely love NPR's Jazz Profiles series. I gather that it ran orginally from 1995-2005, which should mean about 500 or so weekly episodes (if all episodes were originals and not repeats). But the podcast appears to have disappeared! As you can see at the website, there have been weekly updates for only about a year-and-a-half, which simply can't be the measure of the full original series. There simply has to be more. For instance, Bix Biederbecke is an early Jazz icon, but there is no podcast show for him. Nor is there a show on Johnny Dodds or Chick Webb or Coleman Hawkins. And I simply can't imagine that these legends of Jazz would be excluded from the series. But the podcast updates stopped this past December 24. There's been nothing since. And nary a word about it on the website. I wrote to NPR asking for some explanation, but haven't heard back from them. What gives? If anyone knows what's happened to the podcasting of this wonderful series, please leave me a comment. And, for those of you Jazz aficionados who weren't aware of this series, you absolutely MUST check it out. It's truly fantastic.

PS: WTUL bumped me from the Jazz Program DJ schedule. Bummer. That's what happens when there are only 7 Jazz Program slots per week and a slew of undergrads who want those slots and have preference for them. I was developing a bit of a following on my Thursday night Jazz Show for WTUL. And I think I had a pretty awesome show format. But so it goes. I still have a Thursday morning Classical Show, which I enjoy doing; but my heart is with the Jazz. By the way, if you ever want to listen to a great radio station, you can tune in to WTUL via internet livestreaming anywhere in the world where you can find a high-speed internet connection. The website is http://www.wtulneworleans.com. You can link to the live webcast from the home page. Check it out. The Jazz Show runs daily from 6-8pm, and the Classical Show runs Mondays-Fridays from 6-8am.

1 comment:

Nicolas Martin said...

NPR calls the Jazz Profiles podcasts, but only a handful of them are available as downloads at iTunes, and none at the NPR web site. NPR apparently doesn't understand the difference between a stream and a podcast.