Thursday Night Jazz: AJ Johnson’s “Jazz Radio America”

Once a lively presence on radio, jazz now finds itself relegated to satellite broadcasters and low-watt stations at the edge of the dial. In his new book, Jazz Radio America, musician and professor Aaron J. Johnson examines jazz radio from the advent of Black radio in 1948, to its near extinction from the commercial dial after 1980. In this program, AJ will discuss his work and perform some of the soul and jazz tunes the book features with a handful of fellow Pittsburgh musicians. 

Even in jazz’s heyday, programmers and DJs excluded many styles and artists. Jazz Radio America delves into how the politics of decision-making and the political uses of the medium-shaped jazz radio formats. Johnson shows radio’s role in the contradictory perceptions of jazz as America’s model artistic contribution to the world, as Black classical music, and as the soundtrack of African American rebellion and resistance for much of the twentieth century. An interwoven story of a music and a medium, Jazz Radio America answers perennial questions about why certain kinds of jazz get played and why even that music is played in so few places.

You can purchase your own copy of AJ’s book, Jazz Radio America, at City of Asylum Bookstore.

Featured Musicians:

Mark Micchelli: piano

Dwayne Dolphin: bass

James Johnson III: drums

About the Artist:

Aaron J. Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh where he studies and teaches jazz, funk, film music, and MIR (music information retrieval). He studies social aspects of how music is produced, organized, and presented, the efforts of musicians to counter powerful institutional forces, and how musicians use media of all kinds. A professional jazz musician born and raised in Washington, D.C. during the apex of the Chocolate City era, he has electrical engineering degrees from Carnegie Mellon (BSEE) and Georgia Tech (MS) and a PhD in Music from Columbia University. He plays trombone, tuba, bass clarinet, and conch shells. The many musicians with whom he has performed or recorded include Jimmy Heath, Wallace Roney, Steve Turre, Victor Gould, Charles Tolliver, McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Jay-Z, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Oliver Lake, Muhal Richard Abrams, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, and the Mingus Big Band. His recent book from the Illinois University Press is titled Jazz Radio America.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant Cucina Alfabeto is open for dinner from 5-10pm. Please visit Open Table or call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.