The Times-Mail from Bedford, Indiana • 43

Sunday Herald-Times Section Wsmz sszz aSBOESB Sunday, September 29, 1985 New York mecca for musicians from Bloomington WFIU at 3 5 years old finds a loyal audience we do a great deal of our programming a month or more advance, noted Don Glass, program manager lor the station That presents occasional problems because it inhibits our spontaneity. At the same time, none of our programs are etched in stone. If something special comes along we are always willing to consider preempting something else. Unlike the station's earlv years. Glass said training students is now only a secondary function of WFIU.

This station is no longer a training ground for students, al though we employ about 25 to 30 of them at any given tune, Glass said. We exist as a service ot the university, and our role is to serve a listenership that covers 20 counties." Only recently, Glass observed, has public radio begun to lose its image as a "stodgv medium for high brow" individuals. For a long tunc we were under tiie impression that our listeners By Mike Pearson Sunday Herald Times Few mediums can claim the audience loyalty enjoyed by public radio, a case in point being WFIU on the Indiana University campus which will celebrate its 35th year of operation next month. Founded in 1950 as a training ground for students, W'FIU has grown from an infant station with a 13-hour broadcast day, staffed by a handful of determined students working out of a ramshackle, one-booth structure on North Jordan Avenue, to an operation that today employs more than 35 stall members and logs more than 130 broadcast hours a week. Along the way the station, at 103.7 on your FM dial, has witnessed and facilitated countless changes in the public radio field, including being one of 90 charter members to carry the popular National Public Radio show All Things Considered starting with its debut in May 1971.

By definition "public radio is commercial-free. But WFIU is also radio with a mission, in this case to inform and enlighten listeners in more than 20 southern Indiana counties with programming that runs the gamut from classical music to jazz; from radio drama to news. Today WFIU's operation is far more sophisticated than in the early days, said Dick Bishop, development director for Bishop began working at the station as a part-time student announcer in 1959, and he was instrumental in introducing jazz into the young stations format with a 15-minute program called Jazz Review. When I was a student announcer (1959-1961) WFIU was a much more intimate place than it is now, Bishop recalled, largely because we had to work out of an old pre fab building with a single hallway that went right through it like a bowling alley. In those days there wasn't any place for faculty members to hide; students were on a first-name basis with their professors, and working side-by-side you really got the impression that radio was a family afiair." The infant WFIU was also a fertile training ground for successful careers, Bishop noted, cit ing hands-on iraming" as the key.

A lot of good people got their start at WFIU, he said, "among them Dick Enberg (of NBC), Plul Jones (CBS News) and John Rappoport, who went on to become the head writer for Laugh If WFIU has lost the "Ultimate feeling of its early days, the station has gained something just as valuable, Bishop said: a concrete locus. In the early days we had a different mission, in the sense that we were an educational station carrying shows that ranged from self produced dramas to the Navy and Air Force hour, he said Today our mission is that of a public radio station: we provide programming that is both entertaining and informative. Weve got a much better handle on who our audience is and what they want. Given the highly competitive nature of commercial radio, public radio has otten be relegated to the role of onlooker, forever present but never directly rompetmg for audiences and advertising One of our big problems. said station general William Kroll, "is that we don't subscribe to a rating service, so the only wav we have of gauging our listeners' happiness or dissatisfaction is by the phone calls and letters we get.

And believe me when I say that we've got a very vocal iisten-ership Funding for public radio is also a constant challenge, Kroll said. In addition to receiving funding from the federal government and the State of Indiana, every fall WFIU conducts a fund drive to generate additional capital. Last years fund drive raised nearly $75,000, and this year's effort set to start Nov. 8 is expected to top that figure, The station's cash flow is constant, Kroll added, for even as funding comes in it goes back out, whether in the form ot salanes. $8,000 for satellite feeds or the $11,000 in dues to NPR tor some of the station's most popular pro grams.

Unlike commercial radio stations, WFIU is also faced with the task of planning most of its programs weeks in advance. Because we publish a programming guide (Directions in Sound) NEW YORK I often attend shows and concerts with a certain friend. And she, a native New Yorker, is (or acts) annoyed whenever I point to actors and musicians from Bloomington. 1 never even heard of Bloomington before I knew you," she'll grumble, "and now everywhere we go there's someone from Bloomington!" She exaggerates, but there's a definite Bloomington presence all around the New York theater and music scene, especially jazz musicians. Don Sebeskys big band was playing Fat Tuesdays and there was Roger Rosenberg, ex Blooming-toman, on the baritone sax.

We attended a tribute to Django Reinhardt at Carnegie Hall and there was Randy Sandke playing trumpet. I remember Randy Sandke from the latter 1960s, fronting Bloomington's pioneer fusion band Mrs. Seamans Sound Band (forerunner of the legendary Screaming Gypsy Bandits). Another from that band, saxophonist Michael Brecker, is now a superstar of the studios in New York. And so is his brother, trumpeter Randy Brecker, also an IU alumnus.

Another ex-Bandit, trumpeter Michael Gribbroek, is typical of the New York working musician: working dances and other like events, trying to break into the studios, filling in with jazz bands. (Sometimes, hes said, hell spend a whole weekend in a tuxedo, traveling from gig to gig to gig.) And theres plenty more from where they come from. I fell into a Bloomington minireunion a while ago just up the street from where I live in Chelsea, at a restaurant-with-jazz called the Angry Squire. The Michael Weiss Trio was featured and some other ex-Bloomington musicians happened by: bassist Todd Kuhlman, fellow pianist Steve Ash and Gordon Lee, who played keyboards with Brains, the weird band Mark Bingham and I fronted at The Bluebird in 1976. Gordon Lee was splitting the following morning (for Portland) and two more Bloomington musicians were about to move into Lees Brooklyn apartment: pianist Jim Beard and guitarist Jon Hcrington.

The musicians who are serious about doing it, said Michael Weiss, "will come to New York." Weiss is now half-way into establishing himself. He works with name jazz musicians, especially saxophonist Junior Cook, but he's not yet a name himself. He was working almost at once after he moved to New York in 1982, first as a pianist for singer Jon Hendricks. I auditioned and within a few days left on the road for a couple of months, he said. We went all around the country (and to Europe) at breakneck speed.

Soon after, he was playing with Junior and trumpeter Bill Hardman, musicians hed been listening to for years. Junior was on the first jazz record I bought when 1 was 15, he said. It was Blowing the Blues Away with Horace Silver. And now Im playing with Junior. One of the first gigs with Junior was at a point that used to be across the street from (but not as nice as) The Angry Squire.

"There was a place called the Star Cafe, Weiss said. This was about as filthy and funky as you can imagine in New York which means twice as funky as anywhere 'else. The whores would step into the bathroom to clean up. There was coke going around, and a card game in the basement. But there was jazz there a few nights a week.

I worked there with Junior about two years. It was there we got tight and estab- thing literary, when I took my first newspaper job," he has written. "I had a fierce and unnatural craving for something else entirely. Chicago, 1928, that was the general idea Drunken reporters out on the ledge of the A 'eics peeing into the Chicago River at dawn Nights down at the detective bureau it was always nighttime in my daydreams of the newspaper life. Reporters didnt work during the day.

I wanted the whole movie, nothing left out Wolfe worked on newspapers lor 10 years. After six months as a general assignment reporter for the Springfield, Union, Wolfe joined The Washington Post and did local and Latin America reporting. In I960 he won Washington Newspaper Guild awards tor foreign reporting, on Cuba, and tor humorous drawings and articles on the Senate civil rights filibuster. He joined the legendary and now defunct Hew York Herald Tribune in 1902 as an artist reporter. Wolfe has said hi- famous writing style began to develop on the dying news paper as he tried to "capture the spontaneity of thought, not just speel Wolfe said his eyes were opened in 1962 to the possibility that journalism could be prai tired as an art torm that could rival fiction.

He said his revelation catjio when he Bourne In New York lished a good playing and personal relationship and developed a pretty good repertoire of rare standards and tunes that aren't performed that often. Ixiu Donaldson, the be-bop saxophonist, jammed there with Weiss and soon became another frequent employer. "Lou is old school, Weiss said. When you're on the stand, he just kicks off the tune and everybody falls in line. You have to really be on top of it.

So many young players today don't know how to handle themselves in that situation, don't know the repertoire or the way things work. Weiss learned something of the way things work in Bloomington but more from playing than in class. The Music School should have some kind of class, he said, like Professional Aspects of Being a Musician, that talks about problems in getting work and how to promote yourself. The one thing that helped me was the School had a booking agency that would book student groups at little functions, and I was pretty busy. There's no substitute for professional experience.

Weiss became a fixture on the Bloomingtonlndianapolis jazz scene. "The best experience I got when I was at IU," he said, "was playing in Indianapolis with older musicians. I had a little group with Pookie Johnson and Al Kiger. We played Bears Place a couple of times. That was a situation where I was a leader.

When you're a leader you get the idea of what its like to try to get other people to play music you want to play, and to get everyone to make a rehearsal and be at the gig on time. Working joints with Junior and the others (also Clifford Jordan and Slide Hampton) was graduate school. In the old days, Weiss said, jazz musicians who came up got it together by working as side-men with the more established players, and after a while they went on to do their own thing. I don't think that happens anymore. It's difficult for an unknown to interest club owners and recording execs.

Its a Catch-22, Weiss said. "Agents dont want to take you on if you haven't already done this or that. Nobody wants to be the first to see Jazz, page D5 Michael Weiss read Gay Talese's Esquire profile of Joe Ixiuis. The article was written like a non-fiction short story, opening with the personal by-play between Louis and his fourth wife at an airport and ending with an intimate scene in his second wile's living room. Wolfes own national debut with wildly unconventional journalism was his article on California's car cult in Esquire in 1963.

Stricken with writers block as his deadline approached, he was unable to do anything other than write his notes in the form of a "letter to his editor. He thought the editor would have another writer put the notes into article form, but the editor printed the piece verbatim. The popular article confirmed Wolfe's belief that writers often do their best work in letters, when they arc not trying to impress critics, editors or other writers. Wolfe soon became the leading spokesman for what was called New Journalism, a writing stvle that he said "combines the emotional impact usually found only in novels and short stories, the analytical insights of the best essays and scholarly writing, and the deep factual foundation of 'hard report ing, were pretty stuffy, and it wasn't an image we liked, he noted. But as we have gotten more into fund raising and had first-hand contact with many of these people, we have found that public radio appeals to a wide selection of listeners.

Some listen for the classical music. Some like it for the jazz and folk music. And still others tune in for the news and public atfairs programs. WFIU will stage an open house from 2 to 5 p.m. Oct.

20 to celebrate its 35th anniversary. In addition to serving refreshments and offering tours of the station, WFIU will give listeners a chance to meet Robert Conrad, vice president and program manager of WCLV-Cleveland. Conrad hosts the Cleveland Orchestra broadcasts heard on WFIU on Wednesday nights. He also hosts a popular show called Weekend Radio from Cleveland. Conrad will do a live broadcast of "Weekend Radio from the WFIU studios on Oct.

19. Five years later his book on modern art, The Painted Word, created controversy and won an award from the National Sculpture Society. Wolle took a similarly critical and comic look at architecture in Ftom Rau haus to Our House, published in 1981. The Ripht Stuff, his national best seller about the birth of the United States space program, appeared in 1979. Wolte spent six years researching the book.

He read aviation histories, space llight reports and criss-crossed the nation con ducting interviews so that he could waite with authotity about the space piogram. the original seven astronauts and their wives. Wolte is also an artist and satirist Ills first collection of drawings. In Our Tune, was published in 1980. His most recent work, serialized in Rolhnt Stone as lUmJire of the Vanities, is a novel set New York It has not yet been released in hook form.

The 51 year old Wolle grew up in Ri hmond. Va and graduated from Washihgton and Lee University. He leceived his doctoiate in American Studies liom Yale University. Wolle said his live years in grad uate school lett him with a craving to expi'i'ieni "the real world" as a newspaper reporter i "God knows 1 didn't have anything new mind, moth less Tiny- Oto by Ld'fy t'l. George Walker gets the day off to a classical start for early morning WFIU listeners as host of the local musical part of Morning.

He plays classical records starting at 6 a.m. Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe to be here Tuesday By Richard Gilbert Staff Wnter Torn Wolfe, the author of numerous popular books dealing with American culture, including the recent bestseller The Riqht Stuff, will let tui at Indiana 1'imersity on Tuesday Wolle will speak at 8 111 111 the Indiana University Auditorium on the topic "Aineiiran Literature from Knot Aid to The Rieht Stuff." The lei Hire is tree, and a public reception ill tollow his talk. Ills fust book, a collection of articles he had published previously in mauitines. was 'I he Kandy-Kolnred Tanpei me I- hike Sit cant line Holn in The title story is about the ahlornui custom car subculture Three veal's later, Wolle published another ollection ot articles. 'I he Rump House (kmc.

and 7 he Llectin Kool Aid Arid Test, his first hook that dealt with a single sub ect id Test is about the adw ntures ot novelist Ken Kesey and his band ot "Men Prank-, Pa's as they ex penniented with LSD The pnnksieis mixed LSD with Kool Aid and di ank it from a huge cooler as they toured the ounlrv a bus In PiTu. Wolle's wicked portrayal nl pohtu al stances and sn ml sty les, Radh al hie and Man Maump the 1 1nk Cult hcis. was published Ttjm Wolfe: practicing New Journalism.