May 2002

From the Inside Out
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By Chris M. Slawecki

For the first time in its seventeen year history, the Mellon PSFS Philadelphia Jazz Festival honors in 2002 a person who has never composed, arranged, performed or recorded one single note of music, but who may be more responsible than any other person for the past two decades of Philadelphia’s cantankerous yet continuous love affair with jazz, National Public Radio personality Bob Perkins. Perkins was also named the inaugural recipient of the new Mellon Jazz Community Award for his service to Philadelphia’s jazz community.

In naming the popular DJ to be the first Jazz Community Award recipient, Paul S. Beideman, chairman of Mellon Mid-Atlantic, said, “Like all art forms, jazz derives much of its vitality from the interaction between artists and patrons, and no one has done more than Bob Perkins to develop a following in this community for jazz artistry that’s engaged, enthusiastic and knowledgeable. He’s an ideal selection as our Mellon Jazz Community Award winner.” Perkins received an original sculpture by acclaimed Pennsylvania glass artist Kathleen Mulchahy during the April 18 Jazz Festival press conference announcing his award.

Perkins has done just about everything a person can do in radio, including winning several regional and national music journalism awards and captaining a twenty year run when his WHYY-FM show was the only jazz program on Philadelphia public radio. A Philadelphia native, he began his radio career in Detroit in 1964. Philadelphia’s WDAS-FM offered him the chance to join their news team and return home in 1969. He worked at ‘DAS for nearly twenty years, during which time he also began hosting his jazz radio program on WHYY. In his dignified way, Perkins has become as important to the musical landscape of Philadelphia as any studio, club, producer or musician. Perkins currently holds court from 6pm to 9pm on Philadelphia’s NPR station WRTI-FM 90.1, from Temple University. He spoke with AAJ after being named the 2002 Mellon PSFS Philadelphia Jazz Fest honoree.

AAJ: Do you remember your first radio show?
BP: I remember the day. I moved to Detroit in 1964 and I liked it up there; not in radio, but in insurance, which is what I was doing in Philadelphia. I went there to visit, liked it, a few months later I moved there. I had family there, two brothers, and I took a job at an insurance company. On the way in the door to get the job, I noticed there was a radio station on the second floor. I went up to the radio station and told them that I worked downstairs, and could I double up and maybe work upstairs. They said, “If it’s daytime, fine.” I said, “Well, I’m working in the daytime downstairs,” and they said, “We can’t use you then.” I went outside, walked around the block four or five times, came in, and accepted the job upstairs and quit the one downstairs. Oh, yeah. The one that I didn’t even work at yet, that I had but I didn’t work at.

AAJ: On the whole has radio has been respectful or fair to the music of jazz?
BP: No…radio is about money. It was much different when I broke in. When I broke in, it was at the end of an era. I played B.B. King and washed it down with Coltrane. You could mix genres of music at that time. Then the Beatles and kids from the U.K. come over, and I think the record labels found out that they could make a heckuva lot more money backing them than they could jazz.

Jazz is kind of a cerebral music. You have to think about it. It’s sort of like looking at a Van Gogh or a Picasso: You’re trying to find out what the artist is trying to say to you. I think the same thing applies to Coltrane or some of the great cats, or ladies, in their solos. You try to think what that person is trying to convey. And that takes thought. In this helter-skelter society, there’s no room for thought. You know, there’s not a lot of thinking going on today. People just do.

AAJ: Is the music business that much different today from when you started?
BP: It has nothing to do, or too much, with talent. You can look at your television and see that. Politics, every walk of life. You can look at it from presidents on down. You wonder, “Where the hell are they? What’s in their mind?” I’m an editorial writer, which has added another ingredient to my writing about jazz. Started out doing news in my first job, talk shows from out of furniture store windows, just about everything. I wanted to learn. I was 27 or 28 when I got into this racket and I had to go at a gallop because I wanted to learn the whole thing. My mentors were Edward R. Murrow, Eric Severeid, Robert Trout…I mean, the kings when radio was king, that’s the stuff I listened to when I was coming up. Not knowing that I was going to get into this racket later on myself. But I listened to radio when radio was king. I saw the change. The change to me has been, whoo, scary. I remember when you had to have “a voice” to get in radio.

AAJ: Do you view the role of a DJ on a music program to be different from the role of a host on a talk program?
BP: Disc jockeys used to have sway. The Program Director kind of turned you loose with a few admonitions -- Don’t do this, don’t do that -- but they left you alone and you could play two or three genres of music. Play R&B and mix it with jazz. You could even throw in gospel. But that changed, and now people play by playlist. I’m very fortunate to have 38 years in this racket in November, and the people at ‘RTI trust me. I was the ONLY music personality over at WHYY for twenty years. That was the only jazz show that they had so nobody said, “Do this” or “Do that,” I was kind of on my own. I made out quite well, so they knew to trust me and to leave me alone and I didn’t have to go the playlist route. Before that, I was a program director, so I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve never had people looking over my shoulder.

The public has responded to me, which sort of kept people off my neck. They learned to trust me because I brought in the figures. But today, you play by playlists because stations are about making money. As much as they can possibly make. I guess that’s not a bad thing, because that’s what America’s about, money. It’s not about art for art’s sake. You know when you see that lion roar and it says something in Latin over top of that lion, it’s Latin and it means “Art for art’s sake.” You say that to somebody now, they’ll punch your nose. “What do you mean, art, man? I’ve got to make money. To hell with art.”

AAJ: Has jazz been fair to its audience? A lot of the advances in the music, such as bebop and free jazz for example, seem almost deliberately difficult to play and appreciate.
BP: You’ve got horses kind of pulling in the wrong direction. When you have a creative and spontaneous art form like jazz…Van Gogh wouldn’t go up to another artist and say, “Let me paint on your canvas, baby.” But when it’s free and open, and when you’re expressing yourself where there are no notes and you’re blowing, and there’s five guys or five ladies from different nationalities, different countries, and different ethnicities, and you give them ten minutes and they will play you a song despite their language barrier, that’s magnificent.

So you’re going to have some flux and some change in there. You’re going to have people standing on other peoples’ shoulders and then saying, “I can take it out further.” We saw one guy do it. Then we saw three or four guys do it. We saw Trane do it. We can trace his influence: He was one Trane, then he was two Tranes, then he was three Tranes. He graduated up to different levels. Same with Miles. I think Miles was predicated more on…maybe not as artistic as Coltrane, nowhere near as artistic. Miles was trying to stay alive and maybe trying to create some new music. When you say “Miles,” people who don’t know anything, they open the book to the middle. And to see if the butler did it, they open to the end. But they know nothing about the Miles of the late ‘40s and ‘50s, you see?

When you have this creative music, you’re going to have people jumping in and saying, “I can do better than that, I’m going to take it out a little further.” That’s what the be-bop guys did when they graduated from swing. A lot of swing musicians, like Diz, went from there and over into another genre of music. When you have a creative art form, this can happen. And, unfortunately, with a society moving as quickly as we do, nobody has time to stop and get off and say, “Let me follow this.” People are moving too damn fast. They want elevator music, “smooth jazz” or whatever they call it, because it doesn’t take a lot of thought. There’s nothing that challenges today because people don’t have time for the challenges.

AAJ: Do people in different cultures listen to jazz differently?
BP: People wonder why jazz is so good in Europe and Japan. They still savor. Jazz music is cuisine. It’s supposed to be savored, like a wine. The French take an hour to eat. In Japan, the same thing: They revere this American art form and its artists, because they take the time. Over here, where we’re so spoiled and so used to these people, we don’t take time. “Oh, they’re always going to be there. I’ll see Jimmy Jones tomorrow at Club XYZ. He’s going to be here.” In Asia, it’s not like that. You don’t know WHEN you’re going to see Jimmy Jones again. So they savor Jimmy Jones while they have him there. We create things, then we move too fast to savor them. We created this art form over here, and now we’re a little too fast for it.

AAJ: How do you describe the personal style of your radio program?
BP: I try to stick with the melody. I don’t go too far out. I try to stick with the melody because people fell in love to melody. They didn’t fall in love to free-form. Neither did some classical music fans fall in love to Jascha Heifetz playing Beethoven’s Fifth; that man or lady fell in love to Ellington, Gershwin, Cole Porter, that’s what they romanced to. If you’re sixty, sixty-five, seventy, possibly you remember the great standard music. I play it for you interpreted by Coltrane, by Miles, by Diz. The jazz classics that were written by Diz and so forth, I play you those. I play you a combination of original jazz and standards, jazzed-up. It’s not brain surgery, it’s not rocket science, it just takes a little thought. But the moguls have no time for this kind of thought. They want to make a lot of money, every day. They do not have time to program like I program. I’m trying to go back fifty years and bring back what was.

AAJ: Do listen to music in your personal time?
BP: No. I love to share. I get no kick out of listening to music by myself, except when I’m in the studio, where you’re forced to. I know there’s an audience out there but I just can’t see them. I love that camaraderie. Jazz is such a democratic music. Jazz musicians will say, “Can I sit in, please?” They will allow that person to do that. It’s the most democratic art form there is. It broke a lot of barriers in the ‘30s, with Hamp and Benny Goodman, with Roy Eldridge and Gene Krupa.

The arts have a tendency to humanize us. Without art, we’d be running around still on all fours grunting at one another. I just love this music because it does that. It can play with your emotions. People tell me the most flattering things. “I stayed at work a half hour later so that I could catch YOU on my drive home, rather than get home earlier without you.” Now, goddammit, is that flattering or isn’t it? Somebody tells you that and you’re standing there with your bare face hanging out and you don’t know what to say in appreciation. It just shows you that people are so beleaguered by problems today, commuting and problems at home with children and wife and husband…any respite that you can give them, it’s a blessing.

AAJ: What are your five favorite records?
BP: Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West. Horace Silver, Six Pieces of Silver. MJQ, Django. Miles’ Kind of Blue. And I guess the one with Coltrane and Hartman (John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman).

AAJ: What the most incredible live performance you’ve ever seen?
BP: It was in a place on Chestnut Street (in Philadelphia) called the 38th Street Café. They had a tribute to McCoy with John Blake, Gary Bartz and Grover Washington Jr. This was like ’82. It felt almost like God was in the house that night. It was just…you could hear a pin drop but the place was packed, and they played like madmen, men possessed. Grover was an EXCELLENT jazz musician, and Blake, I thought he was going to saw the damn thing in half. Gary Bartz was excellent. They called McCoy up to play, and I tell you: It was the most spiritually moving…I thought I was in a Baptist church.

AAJ: Have you ever played or studied an instrument yourself?
BP: I was going to study violin at thirteen. My older sister got a violinist to come to the house. My peers kidded me out of it. You know, the windows were open, no air conditioning in those days, and they were coming by the window and they’d hear this awful screeching. They would peek in the window and say, “What the hell are you doing? Come out here and play ball. Put that damn thing down.” I let them kid me out of it. I just wish I had enough nerve to say, “You guys can go to you know where. I’m gonna keep sawing on this thing ‘till I get as good as Grappelli!”

AAJ: What is your favorite ten-year span of music?
BP: The ‘50s into the ‘60s. When you had Lee Morgan and Miles playing the stuff that we used to like them to play, and Coltrane. That’s before things got wild, and a couple other guys said, “Well, let’s go play some free jazz,” or whatever. When you said “jazz” in those days, you did not have to define it, and you didn’t have to say what kind. They knew damn well what kind you were talking about.

AAJ: How, if at all, has internet technology changed your radio show or even jazz in general?
BP: I hope that what one person told me is maybe true for a lot of other people. Her husband moved from Philadelphia to some corner of the country where they can’t get us. I reminded her of the internet. She said, “Oh, that’s right, I can get you on the internet!” And I hope many more people are doing that. I just got a letter yesterday from a gentleman who went to India. He liked Indian music, and he used to take my jazz from WHYY when I was there over to India and trade musics. Now, he said, I don’t have to do that, because of the internet. So I hope that a lot of other people are doing what these two people did.

AAJ: What would you like to leave our readers with in closing?
BP: I would just advise them, if I may, to listen to the program on the radio, on the internet, and if you listen long enough, I hope to getcha! And in getting ya, all the things that you wanted to know about jazz could possibly be answered, not through me, but through the music. Jazz has been out of sight, out of mind, out of earshot, out of hearing range, but if you give it a chance, it’ll get ya. I am just a conduit.