I recommend a visit to Second Inversion radio for their wonderful video of the Third Coast Percussion ensemble’s new soundtrack to the 1966 Canadian short feature titled Paddle to the Sea. It is quite something. The musicians deploy skittering wood blocks and water-filled wine glasses to create a beautiful nature-filled sound environment.
Paddle to the Sea was (and still is) about an indigenous boy who carves a little canoe steered by an elder, and then sets it on its way. The documentary follows the mini-canoe’s adventures as it treks from Lake Superior to the ocean, tangling with frogs, squirrels, ice floes, fishermen, and small children. It was based on Holling C. Holling’s 1941 book with the same name.
Paddle to the Sea , Bill Mason, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
Meanwhile I am also reading with interest a San Diego Tribune story that briefly focuses on the vibrant life and sudden death of “smooth jazz” radio. The article focuses on the flute work of Nestor Torres and his influences, among them the brilliant flute and saxophonist James Moody, who died in San Diego in 2010.
“Before the national smooth jazz radio format began to implode nearly a decade ago,” author George Varga notes, “Torres regularly received airplay on such stations, including San Diego’s KIFM (which shifted to pop vocal-dominated programming in early 2011 and now plays ‘classic hits’).” Apparently in 2011 a San Diego smooth jazz festival cancelled itself due to lack of interest.
“It’s very ironic,” Torres is quoted as saying. “The smooth jazz radio format is dead, when — in fact — there is still a smooth jazz audience. So the format is far from over. It’s alive and well.”
Indeed, there are quite a number of Internet based smooth jazz stations out there, such as Smooth Jazz Florida and, well, Smoothjazz.com. But, now that I bother to notice, there’s an entire thread at Radio Discussions titled What Killed Smooth Jazz on the FM band. Prominent among the theories: that the format, which often softly plays in the background, could not properly send encoding signals to Arbitron’s Portable People Meter (later acquired by Nielsen).
Others contend that it was just Smooth Jazz’s time to die: “The music got old, boring, and predictable. It became wallpaper music, like beautiful music in the early 80s. At one time, that format was getting big ratings everywhere. Then it dropped off the face of the earth. That was a long time before PPM. It has nothing to do with Nielsen. It just happens.”
What I find interesting are the influences that Torres cites, James Moody among them. Here’s a Youtube of Moody’s phenomenal rendition of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” from Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. It’s not a very smooth jazzy kind of thing, but it is gorgeous.
Last week I wrote a rather whiny piece about the unfortunate recent fate of two jazz oriented radio stations. I can’t really say that I mourn the death of smooth jazz on FM radio, but I’m glad it is still treading water somewhere. There’s even a smooth jazzish version of Bach’s Overture #3 that I like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oxQLZcpSN0
To steal a phrase from West Side Story, somewhere a place for smooth jazz.
