By Jason West
Jim Wilkes warm voice and subtle musical tastes are known to thousands of jazz fans throughout the US and Canada who tune in regularly to hear his Jazz After Hours program on National Public Radio. Although Jazz After Hours has been on the air since the 1980s, Wilke has been recording and broadcasting jazz in Seattle since the 1960s. In fact, Jazz Northwest, a popular weekly hour-long radio show hosted by Wilke, showcases the latest local releases and provides a voice for Northwest artists whose music might otherwise go unnoticed in the media. Simply put, Wilke is Seattles omnibus of jazz. Hes taped hundreds of live concerts, befriended a slew of prominent musicians, and as his listeners may imagine, is one of the nicest guys youd ever want to meet.
To find out more about Jim, check out his new web site:
www.jazzafterhours.org
Jason West: When did you begin recording live jazz in Seattle?
Jim Wilke: I began doing weekly live jazz radio programs from The Penthouse in 1962 on KING-FM. Those were live and direct (not recorded for later broadcast). People would come by the club after the live broadcast to see the group they'd just heard on the radio. Artists included Cannonball, Bill Evans, Dizzy, Coltrane, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, Wynton Kelly and many others who were on the scene then. After the Penthouse closed in 1968, I started recording jazz at various locations for later broadcast, and have continued more or less ever since. This has also spun off into a location recording business on the side. I'm recording four or five times a month on the average. Numerous CDs have resulted.
Jason West: What is the scope of your recording archives (hours of tape, number of artists)? What do you plan to do with these recordings?
Jim Wilke: Hard to estimate, John Gilbreath once asked that one night as I was setting up. I guessed somewhere over a thousand location recordings. I archive them for possible future interest. A few artists have requested and released some of the older material. I've had some interest from a few record producers but no sustained program of releasing the music.
Jason West: Can you list a few of your most memorable live recording experiences?
Jim Wilke: A live broadcast of the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1967... the thrill of having that great band under my fingertips - Harry Carney, Cootie Williams, Johnny Hodges, Ray Nance, Duke.. my oh my! Also a live New Year's Eve broadcast of Woody Herman's Herd for the NBC Radio Network. Several shows each with Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, The MJQ, Art Blakey (including one New Year's Eve with the young Marsalis brothers Wynton & Branford). More recently, recording the mainstage concerts every summer at Jazz Port Townsend.
Jason West: Do you have 100 percent control over your programming?
Jim Wilke: Absolutely, does it show?
Jason West: How do you create your playlist for each edition of Jazz After Hours?
Jim Wilke: As I go. I try to relate each piece of music to the next one. It might be similar, related thematically, or contrast for change of pace or texture. I hope it never sounds random, but instead varied and evolving as it goes. Although I focus on recent releases, I try to include some classics and ballads and blues as well as burners. I think I learned about program pacing by watching great jazz performers who kept your interest by varying tempos, textures, kinds of material, tension and release, etc. That's part of the reason why I like live recordings. I try to get the feel of live performance in my shows - one listener said Jazz After Hours was like listening to jazz in a club.
Jason West: Who are some of your favorite artists and/or periods in jazz history?
Jim Wilke: I'd probably start the list with most everybody in bop and cool eras, from the late 40s through the early 60s because I grew up with that music and saw most all of them with the exception of Bird and Mingus. I became acquainted with the early history through records and reading and eventually teaching jazz history at Cornish College. I stay up to date by listening to new releases as they come out and hearing as much live music as I can, especially when visiting cities like New York or L.A.
Jason West: You have thousands of regular listeners. What kinds of feedback do you commonly receive?
Jim Wilke: I don't take calls when I'm on the air, I don't give out the phone number of the studio. I used to get a few letters, but not many. A lot of listeners thought I was at their local station. Now, I give the email and website address on the air and many people contact me that way. Some of the 80 stations carrying Jazz After Hours stream to the web, so I'm also getting email from places like Australia, Hong Kong, Scotland and Spain. In some of these areas people are listening in late afternoon or mid morning. Listeners have been very complimentary. Some want more info about specific selections - complete playlists are on our website. The website is being redesigned and will shortly be reborn with many new features including listener comments and an expanded photo gallery. The new URL will be jazzafterhours.org (probably online by May).
Jason West: Your Best of the Northwest for 2000 list featured over 20 recordings by NW jazz artists, the most ever for a single year. To what extent has the recent explosion in quality NW releases impacted local jazz radio programming?
Jim Wilke: I think it's had a major effect - I hope it has. I've always felt it was important to feature resident talent, and a lot of our resident talent is on a par with a lot of nationally recognized artists. I think part of our job in jazz radio is to let people know that jazz is not just music that was recorded forty or fifty years ago by someone who's now deceased. It's happening right now in our neighborhoods, in restaurants, concerts, schools, clubs, parks, festivals - and it's very accessible in every sense of that word.
Jason West: Rate Seattle's jazz scene on a national scale with regard to quantity and quality of musicians and venues?
Jim Wilke: I think it ranks somewhere in the top half dozen....after New York,
Chicago and LA, Seattle ranks along with places like Detroit, Minneapolis, Boston. I get jazz info from all over the country, and it seems like there's more going on here than most other areas.
Jason West: How do the jazz scenes in Portland and Vancouver B.C. compare to what's happening in Seattle?
Jim Wilke: Neither Portland nor Vancouver seems able to maintain a major club like Jazz Alley for traveling performers week in week out. We're particularly fortunate in having Jazz Alley, one of the top three jazz clubs on the West Coast (the others being Yoshi's in Oakland and Catalina in L.A.). Tula's and the New Orleans provide satisfying outlets for resident players and singers and occasional out of town guests. Plus there's all the great neighborhood places that have music one or two or three nights a week. On the other hand we can't seem to get an on-going major name summer jazz festival like duMaurier in Vancouver or Mt.Hood in the Portland area. There've been at least three or four attempts to start a regular summer festival here. However, Earshot's fall festival is smaller in scale, with lots of performances indoors in smaller venues and has a winning record of presenting interesting music though it is lower profile. Maybe that's a good sign... maybe the jazz scene is so good year around we don't need a big blowout weekend to satisfy our jazz jones. If I had to choose, I'd rather have a good year round scene than one big summer jazz festival and not much the rest of the time. I much prefer to have a Ray Brown or Joshua Redman group play two sets a night for six nights in a row rather than one forty minute set once a year! Another, very general observation about the three cities... Vancouver seems to welcome more experimental outside jazz. Seattle groups tend to play rather complex new music composed by their members, and Portlanders tend to jam on standards. Of course, there are notable exceptions in each case.
Jason West: If there were one thing that would make the NW jazz scene better, what would it be?
Jim Wilke: One thing? Depends on who you talk to. The money could always be better, for musicians and the presenters. Someone said recently there's lots more places to play now than there were in the 50s, but unfortunately the money's about the same. We have some very devoted club owners like Mack at Tula's and Gaye at the New Orleans who'd probably be better off financially if they weren't running a jazz club. Anything we can do to get jazz out of the closet and into the forefront of people's attention is good. That includes everything from neighborhood restaurants that take out a couple of tables to put in a trio, to big outdoor summer festivals. You shouldn't have to know a secret handshake to be able to enjoy jazz first hand. I'd also like to see more regular exchange of groups between Vancouver, Portland and Seattle. Each city has some great performers that audiences in the other two cities would enjoy and it would broaden everybody's horizons (by a few hundred miles at least.)
