WBGO: Lobotomized?

In my blog last week I commented upon the bland, pasteurized and altogether uninteresting jazz music programming I encountered on WBGO (Newark) while visiting the New York area for the Vision Festival.   I noted how I had always enjoyed listening to WBGO on previous trips to New York (I was born and grew up in New York City and still visit from time to time for special events and to visit family, so am up there a fair amount).  I thought, possibly, that the yawn inducing music on the radio might have just been the result of a contrast with the white-hot intensity of the Vision Festival, which made WBGO’s programming seem so banal.  Then I received a very polite response to my post from Cephas Bowles, WBGO’s General Manager, which shocked me!

Mr. Bowles maintained that  while “WBGO’s programming has not undergone significant content changes for the past several years, ” the station has, in fact, tweaked the content around the edges to make it more enjoyable for a larger segment of the audience “  (my emphasis).  Why did they do this?   According to Mr. Bowles, it was “the need to appeal to a larger audience”  (my emphasis).

I find this response deeply troubling.  There, in Mr. Bowles’ post was my answer.  It wasn’t just the contrast that made WBGO so dull.  It was an actual programming choice.  “Tweaked”?  I don’t think so.  Lobotomized might be closer to what WBGO has done to its musical content.  Cut out all that innovative, exploratory, troubling, challenging, noncommercial  jazz, and heck, even mainstream jazz that has some kick to it,  in favor of  middle of the road, bland, usually quite derivative programming, stuff that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the 1950s, let alone in this millennium.  Mr. Bowles admits that it might even be programming he enjoys, but done supposedly for the greater good of larger audience share. 

What I hear in Mr. Bowles’ response is the corporate rationale of its parent organization, WNPR, whose disdain for jazz and classical programming is well-known.  NPR, these days, is all about going after the commercial market, grabbing audience share, in other words, acting like its corporate, commercial colleagues at  Clear Channel and other broadcasting hacks.  I suspect Mr Bowles and WBGO are caught between a rock and a hard place:  increase audience share or face the corporate music.  But is the solution to present music programming (I can’t even say jazz programming) so bland that it produces mostly yawns?  

Mr. Bowles proudly notes that WBGO is “listener-supported,” so therefore it’s all good  and, hey, if the listener’s like it, it must be OK.  Well, it’s not quite as pure as that.  Go to WBGO’s website and click on corporate sponsorship.  You will find that WBGO is not entirely listener-supported.  The website tells us, “Our audience listens to WBGO an average of 7.4 hours per week. They are used to three or four spots read live by the announcer per hour, not the 17 minutes of spots on most commercial radio stations” (my italics).  So at this listener supported station you will get three or four corporate commercials per hour (soothingly read by WBGO on-air hosts).  Note also the comparison to commercial radio.  So, the music must be made acceptable to corporate suits looking to sell coffee, cars, or whatever.  I guess the answer at WBGO is to create a Jazz Muzak station.

Let me paraphrase the Biblical question:  What profiteth a jazz station to gain audience share and lose its soul?