I often listen to the radio as I sit up in the evening after everyone else has gone to bed. By radio I mean CBC Radio 2, which used to be called CBC FM. They’re famous for classical, but for some time now have had a decent jazz program, After Hours, starting at ten. No longer. A couple of nights I turned it on and now it’s The Signal - With Laurie Brown. I was hopelessly smitten with Laurie Brown many years ago when she was simultaneously the hottest and smartest VJ on MuchMusic (Canada’s MTV), and this during those fifteen Eighties minutes when videos mattered. In any case, The Signal is promising; it’s doing contemporary music without much concern for genres. But you know, it could lighten up a bit; that first night, there was some Björk and some interesting guitar noise and then something called (I’m not making this up) Completely Embraced by the Beauty of Emptiness. Eventually I had no choice but to turn off the radio and put on some ZZ Top. But then I listened again Thursday and they played Dharma at Big Sur, a 2003 work by John Adams that I’d never heard, and hey, it’s great, going to have to get it. Check out Radio 2, they’re online, although I can’t get it to play on Camino, grumph.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: David Smith (Mar 25 2007, at 06:44)
Thanks for this, Tim. My wife misses CBC Radio more than I do (too many years in small BC towns where Barbara Frum was all we could get). Now that we've been Down South for over 20 years, nostalgia has set in.
Wanted to let you know that mplayer on SUSE 10.1 with Firefox does fine - maybe OSX is *NIX enough that you can pick up CBC2 that way.
Ta,
David
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From: Gord Broom (Mar 27 2007, at 16:01)
Hey Tim.
Just in case you don't know, CBC Radio 2 has not gotten rid of jazz altogether, they've just moved it to 6pm-8pm instead. Music For A While is gone, but Danielle Charbonneau is now doing the overnight show. She has the best late-night radio voice -- something you want to hear with the lights low and just a hint of crackle coming over the airwaves.
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