It may seem hard to believe, but in an earlier — and more glorious — era, Chicagoans hardly could turn the radio dial without encountering hot jazz and swing.
The music blasted from the transmitters of WSBC radio in Cicero as early as 1929, when the pioneering black deejay Jack L. Cooper first took to the airwaves. By the 1930s, Earl Hines and his state-of-the-art swing band were broadcasting coast-to-coast and live over WMAQ from the mob-run Grand Terrace Ballroom.
“Yes it is, ladies and gentlemen, Earl `Fatha’ Hines and his red-hot band playing for you from the Grand Terrace on Chicago’s great South Side,” announcer Ted Pearson would proclaim, while Hines and his men swung ferociously in the background. “Put on your dancing shoes and get ready for 30 minutes of super-hot jazz in the `Fatha’ Hines style.”
By the 1940s, Al Benson at WGES was signaling that an orgy of swing rhythm was about to commence.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, this is your old swing master Al Benson bringing you 60 minutes of red-hot, beat-me-down swing tunes of the day,” Benson would say, before plunging into music of Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and other icons of black musical culture.
To the great old deejays, from Cooper and Benson to Sid McCoy and Daddy-O Daylie, distinctions between jazz, blues and swing were irrelevant. If the music swung or dug down deep into the blues, if it celebrated the rhythms and cadences of various black musical forms, it was worth broadcasting.
Yet today, with jazz and swing music resurgent in nightclubs and on indie record labels, Chicagoans practically need a magnifying glass to find a few hours of bona fide jazz programming.
What happened? How could a city known internationally for the breadth of its jazz scene have become virtually a wasteland so far as jazz broadcasting is concerned?
The answers have little to do with music and everything to do with economics.
In essence, radio stations of earlier vintage were comparatively small-scale ventures, turning a decent profit by reaching a loyal, niche audience. Thus a couple of small-time, independent record producers such as Leonard and Phil Chess (owners of Chess Records) could put together enough money in the 1960s to buy their own radio station. The brothers christened their baby WVON (an acronym for “Voice of the Negro”) and used it to hawk their records.
Today an owner of an independent jazz or blues record company could no more buy a radio station than purchase Sears Tower. The prices have reached the stratosphere, driven by the rise of FM radio as a commercial format and the emergence of enormous corporations that often own several stations in the same market.
No specialty music — whether jazz, classical, gospel, acoustic blues or you-name-it — can pull in the massive revenues needed to support radio stations worth in excess of $100 million. The recent demise of WNIB-FM 97.1, which its owners purchased for $8,000 in 1955 and sold last month for $165 million, underscores the point.
So barring some unforeseen miracle, it’s safe to say that Chicagoans never again will be able to find even a single station on the dial that broadcasts jazz around the clock. Instead, jazz listeners forevermore will be forced to surf among several stations, catching snippets of the music on WDCB-FM 90.9, WBEZ-FM 91.5, WNUR-FM 89.3 and other non-commercial outlets.
Yes, the indisputably fine WBEE-AM 1570 still broadcasts the music steadily, but with a signal so faint it hardly can be heard north of the Loop.
The tragedy is that while Chicago still flourishes as a focal point for new ideas in jazz, with independent labels and innovative artists drawing large crowds to a variety of clubs and concert halls, local radio has all but turned its back on the music. Not only are the powerhouse stations uninterested, but even the smaller outlets often have shortchanged the music.
The managers at WDCB, for instance, recently dropped Dave Freeman’s “All Chicago Jazz” in order to make room for Chuck Schaden’s nostalgia show, “Those Were the Days.” WBEZ, meanwhile, features so many musical forms and such a wide range of news and public affairs programs as to obliterate any pretense it once may have held as a jazz station.
The days when great announcers such as Benson and Daylie kept vast audiences transfixed with the sounds of jazz and related musical forms are unlikely to return. Should some computer whiz eventually discover how to make Internet Web casts more reliable, accessible and sonically pleasing than they are today, perhaps jazz listeners again will be able to hear the music at the touch of a button.
But can a medium built on gigabytes, modems and hard drives produce characters as vivid and real as Al Benson or Daddy-O Daylie? Can a community that played and worked to the sounds of a great black radio station, WVON, similarly rally around a Web site?
“In the late 1920s and throughout the ’30s, Chicago was the broadcasting center of the nation and radio was the medium that popularized Chicago jazz,” author Dempsey Travis once wrote. “Radio was a far stronger force than records during the late ’20s and the Depression years of the ’30s, stronger than television is today as far as music is concerned.
“The national prominence of both Earl Hines and the Grand Terrace during the late ’20s, the ’30s and the early 1940s can be attributed directly to Chicago radio.”
Imagine how well today’s Chicago jazz artists would fare if local radio would give them the time of day.
