See response to this article at #17
At WPFW,
A Choice of Jazz or Jabber
By Marc Fisher
Tuesday, February 3, 2004; Page B01
An election this week will determine whether a generation of young people in this region will grow up hearing America's most important musical heritage or a steady diet of political propaganda.
WPFW listeners who donate to the station are voting for a board of delegates that will shape the future of the Washington area's last remaining radio outlet for jazz and blues.
Many candidates are determined to reduce, perhaps dramatically, the time devoted to the music and culture that are so much a part of the history of the city of Duke Ellington, the Howard Theatre and the Black Broadway of U Street.
WPFW (89.3 FM), part of the five-station Pacifica network that has pushed the edge of cultural and political expression in this country for half a century, is at a crossroads.
An internal war that has raged for years -- complete with mid-sentence censorship of the station's programs, lawsuits galore, lockouts and mass firings -- has come to a relatively peaceful conclusion with this vote and similar elections at Pacifica's stations in New York, Houston, Los Angeles and Berkeley.
At question is whether WPFW will remain true to the mission it assigned itself when it signed on in 1977: "Jazz, a major American art form which grows from the African-American experience, will be the major music programming. WPFW will act as archivist, educator, and entertainer on behalf of this under-served national cultural resource." Ever since the D.C. control board forced the University of the District of Columbia to sell off its radio station in 1997, removing the region's only all-jazz voice and handing it over to the policy wonks of C-SPAN, WPFW has been our sole source of this country's native classical music.
But the station has been busy cutting back its jazz offerings over the past couple of years. And now, most of the candidates to serve on the station's board are determined to hijack the station, silence the jazz and turn the station into an outlet for political whining and grousing of the most one-sided and ill-informed sort. Even more sadly, there is, as often happens in Washington, a racial component to this battle, as young radicals, most of them white, seek control of an institution that has been a proud voice of the nation's black heritage.
"There is this contingent of a Berkeley mind-set who want WPFW to parrot the Pacifica station in Berkeley," says Willard Jenkins, host of a jazz show on the station since 1989. "This is one station which uniquely reflects the African American sensibility of this community, as opposed to catering to the needs of those who just got here."
Despite Pacifica's history as a voice of political dissent and intellectual rigor, where Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, among other writers, developed their work, despite Pacifica's grand past as a news organization that sent reporters to the battlefields of Vietnam and the committee rooms of Congress, WPFW was created to play jazz.
Many candidates seek to change that, not by adding balanced, aggressive reporting, but by turning the station into a voice of the extreme left, a politically sanitized program of rants and speeches guaranteed to turn off listeners. (Disclosure: I got my start in news reporting at Pacifica's New York station, which in the 1970s had real reporters covering City Hall, labor, the police and other beats. WPFW, with no such tradition, pays little attention to local affairs.)
"What mystifies me," says Reuben Jackson, jazz archivist at the Smithsonian's American History museum, "is the idea you hear from some people around WPFW that jazz is old people's music. I don't get it. Jazz goes hand in hand with what Pacifica espouses -- democracy."
In a perfect world, we would have radio stations that played jazz, blues, show tunes, bluegrass, techno, choral music and all the other forms that are ignored by commercial and public radio. But in a media landscape ruled by marketing studies and focus groups, there is no room for minority interests. We have only WPFW, and it has an obligation to continue opening the ears of new generations to the vast range of American music.
The station's listeners have their last chance to assert themselves this week. They can defend the station against a takeover by political extremists, or they can sing goodbye to the music.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
See response to this article at #17
". . .there is, as often happens in Washington, a racial component to this battle, as young radicals, most of them white, seek control of an institution that has been a proud voice of the nation's black heritage."
See THE GIFT OF JAZZ - M. Evans' response
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