The Brooklyn Rail

In December 1989, I went to Town Hall for the ten-year reunion concert of Cecil Taylor and Max Roach, revisiting and renewing their historic live performance at Columbia University. That first concert was released as Historic Concerts in 1984 on the Soul Note label. The concert is one of those musical experiences permanently embedded in my memory, the shape and feeling of literally ducking down behind the seat in front of me because the torrent of onrushing ideas was overwhelming and seemed a little dangerous still vivid in my body.

The other unforgettable part of that night was when I got back to my apartment in Fort Greene after midnight, I turned on the radio which was permanently tuned to WKCR, 89.9 FM. The station was playing the Historic Concerts LP, and I immediately recovered the sensations I had earlier. Those were more than the stimuli of listening to music, but the feeling of connecting to a community of shared values. At Town Hall, I was surrounded by people like me who wanted to have Taylor and Roach fill up their minds and bodies, and at home it was people in their homes, maybe their cars, who were drawn together by the same desire to hear what the DJs at this station might pick for them.

That’s the fundamental experience of radio in general and what makes—or made—WKCR special in a particular way. The large and small stories are told in two valuable recent books, Live From the Underground: A History of College Radio, by Katherine Rye Jewell (University of North Carolina Press) and Transfigured New York: Interviews with Experimental Artists and Musicians, 1980–1990 (Columbia University Press), a collection of interviews that Brooke Wentz conducted on-air when she was host of the “Transfigured Night” late night show at WKCR, the same show that played Historic Concerts that night.

WKCR is college radio, the station at Columbia University (installed at the University but supported by its listeners, not the administration), founded in 1941. Its origin predates what Jewell describes as the creation and development of college radio, which was grounded in government action. First, in the 1930s, “educational radio proponents… secured the noncommercial, educational FM spectrum allocation,” followed in 1945 by the FCC setting aside the bands between 88.1 and 91.9 on the left end of the dial for “noncommercial, educational (NCE) radio.”

This administrative side is an enormous part of the story, and essential to college radio’s existence. The FCC regulates the airwaves and licenses stations, and preserving non-commercial bandwidth—not just even, but especially, at low wattage/local reach—made not just the space but the freedom for college radio in both actual and conceptual terms. Without the pressure for profits, stations were free to broadcast whatever their DJs and managers desired. While for the first few decades a lot of the programming was not just educational but limited by power and often could not reach out of the physical college plant (broadcasting via current carrying wires), Jewell points to the 1970s as the beginning of college radio as a genre unto itself. That means freeform radio, the kind of broadcasting that might follow a Mozart piano sonata with a screaming electric guitar solo, and also fueled the rise of punk rock, hip hop, and other underground music, with curious young people exploring the world of sound and catering to other curious young people who were eager to discover things they had never heard before.

Jewell follows the interesting tension in the college radio idea of musical, social, and political communities. Without commercial pressure, they could stand outside dominant commercial culture. With less literal power, these stations usually had a reach under fifty miles (before web broadcasting existed) and that made for a local community. But who made up that community? WHPK is the station for the University of Chicago, and because of geography also the South Side of Chicago; so should the station serve the University’s community, or that of the very different racial and economic community of the city around it? Can it serve both? Does non-commercial mean the same thing across these communities?

There’s no ultimate answer to that, but WKCR stands as an example of what is possible if a station doesn’t think like it’s college radio. Jewell covers WKCR through how it sits “in an ideal location to connect with hip-hop,” not just transmitting to Harlem and the South Bronx but also airing the freshest local talent, even live in the studio. The music was at the edge of popular culture—Jewell assumes that as the context for college radio—from punk to indie rock, thus college radio as a genre/stylistic idea. That’s where WKCR was different, because in the late 20th century its community was that of curious, involved, and informed music lovers in the music community of New York, which has global roots. The criteria was always the best and most important music from around the world, from Medieval times to yesterday. That’s what Transfigured New York captures.

The book is one of the finest chronicles of the great “Downtown Music” era in New York City, and the range of interviews reflects both the musical happenings and the informed and generous values of the station, where the DJs transmitted with an excitement they wanted to share over what they were hearing. Genres mattered in the way they fit against and communicated with each other—it’s the station where I first head the great experimental German rock band Can, and the great contemporary avant-garde Austrian composer Bernhard Lang, both in the afternoon “new music” time slot—and were celebrated for what they were.

Wentz’s interviews (many of which I heard in real-time and can remember down to the details of her vocal timbre) start with John Cage and La Monte Young, and proceed through Alvin Curran, Otto Luening, Joan Tower, Anthony Davis, David Diamond, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Kelvyn Bell, Glenn Branca, Joan La Barbara, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Living Colour, John Lurie, Andy Partridge, Baaba Maal, Astor Piazzolla, Ravi Shakar, Bill T. Jones, and more. They often involve listening and responding to records on the air, which the transcripts can’t capture, but the range of ideas is broader than perhaps any other book on twentieth century music: aleatory, tape composition, Neo-classical and Neo-romantic American compositional styles, funk, harmolodics, metal and symphonic guitar music, minimalism, hard rock, new wave pop, lounge jazz, tango music, West African music, Indian Classical music, et al, etc.

Wentz is knowledgeable about the subjects and also aware of what she doesn’t know, and that makes her an interested and interesting interviewer, fueled by intelligence, passion, and delight. The book is too expansive to be confined by the idea of college radio, but that was WKCR, at a college but not a college radio station. Anyone interested in the cultural history of the decade and/or in the cutting edge of music will find this book exciting and satisfying, and those with long memories will feel some regret for what’s been lost. Coming out of the COVID closure of the studio, the station is not the same. It’s still the best jazz radio there is, and the great birthday marathons remain (and have been expanded with the likes of Maurice Ravel), but the ranks of knowledgeable DJs have thinned beyond the death of the great and unique Phil Schaap. The new DJs are enthusiastic but often unaware of how little they know, pronunciations—which are essential to discovering music—are haphazard, as is the broadcasting schedule, which on-air often differs from what’s promised. Too much is canned—the Ornette Coleman birthday broadcast on March 9 featured a show first aired in 2021.

Weekends remain the best, with reggae until noon, followed by soul, then blues, then folk, then opera on Saturdays, with gospel, bluegrass, country, jazz, and Indian classical Sundays. But college-radio-as-genre has been creeping in; not just Neutral Milk Hotel but Beyoncé—this end of the spectrum is supposed to be non-commercial. Students graduate eventually, and a new generation comes in; one has to believe there’s another Brooke Wentz out there, filling out an application to Columbia. Until she hits campus, though, we have Transfigured New York to savor.