It’s Important to have Heroes

Being an afternoon radio host and music director for a jazz station is a weird job to actually have. I love it, I’m having some of the best professional years of my life right now. But you can spend some time speaking into a microphone thinking “what the hell am I doing?” “are people just going to just listen to Spotify” “do I even listen to the DJ when I’m driving around” “what’s the smartest thing to say about Bob Mintzer” “what will keep people listening”. It’s a lot. Early on in my career I was meeting with my friend Lindsay Kimball, who at the time was the Assistant Program Director at the Current. She was explaining that your average radio DJ has to be convinced that what they do on the mic will keep people listening for longer, enjoying more, donating more, connecting more than some other joe doing the same. That is to say: you have to have a pretty unjustifiable confidence in your own awesomeness. Ask my wife and she’ll tell you that I got that. But, realistically, I think I’m actually pretty well-grounded, not unjustifiably confident in my own awesomess. Nigh! (is that how you use nigh?) I am justifiably confident in my awesomeness. But an important way to bolster and interrogate that confidence is to engage with people in a similar craft who you think are wildly good at what they do. One reason I can envision the path to being great at DJing is by listening to people who I think are on that path and further along it than I. It lets you think in more external ways about how to be great, how to do excellent work as opposed to focusing internally with questions like “why aren’t I great?” “am I great” “this work is excellent right?” “do others think this work is excellent”.

You’re trying to be a great runner, you got to have a couple people who when you watch them run, you can’t believe it. In radio, it’s important have people where when you hear their work your mind reels from the creativity, the effort, the mastery. It’s good to have heroes who are working in a similar space to you. Today I got to spend some listening time with one of those heroes who I haven’t had the chance to listen to lately.

I took the day off from Jazz88 today. I hosted a Spelling Bee for Reading Partners instead. A day off is almost always a treat and I got to do some cool things, training session at the Y, cleaning session at the house, a long lunch of chicken wings with my best friend Martin Devaney and I got to pick up the kids from school and daycare, something that Rachel has to do 5 days a week because of my work schedule. That was all great, but I really big highlight was getting to have enough time to really listen to some radio. I listen to Jazz88, The Current, KMOJ, Radio K, WBGO, KEXP, WWOZ, KQRS and a handful of others. But, I need my ears for my job a lot. I’m listening to music at work. I often listen to podcasts on walks. Sometimes after a long ass shift of playing music I want to listen to something with more talking in it, like a podcast. So, I don’t get to listen to the amount of radio that I want to. But most notably, I don’t get to listen to Larry Mizell Jr. who does the Afternoon Show on KEXP. I pulled up his show from April 20 cause Larry does OG Thursdays and dives into a different record, I also want to see how weed-centric his Seattle broadcast would be. You can listen to this radio show (not forever, but for the next couple weeks) right here.

The show was an absolute joy. He was diving deep into “We Got it From Here. . .Thank You 4 Your Service” from A Tribe Called Quest. What I heard was a show full of preparation, full of audio from other interviews and radio shows (which radio people to seem to call “actualities” but I don’t hear that word used anywhere else). Larry pulled out the source material for a bunch of the songs from the album, told tales, casually snuck in a tremendous deep knowledge of A Tribe Called Quest and their tributaries and he played Keep it Thoro by Prodigy, one of the greatest hip-hop songs of all time. I loved the songs, I loved the conversation, I loved the company. When you hear a DJ liked Larry Mizell Jr. it’s laughable to think that our careers as DJs are in danger because of the advent of AI DJs. First off, if you love an AI DJ you’re a punk. Listen to songs, let the algorithm pick for you, cool. But ask the algorithm to say some shit in between songs? GTFO. But what Larry, and what all the best DJs on planet Earth are doing is imbuing a personal intimacy and companionship to something as breathtaking as the greatest music on planet Earth. To hear Larry bringing that music back into my ears, in a new format, with his touches, with his comments, with his preferences coming through loud and clear. A couple left turns along the way that seem to come strictly from his soul and his muse, not from market research on what sounds right next to an ATCQ deep dive. A long solo rendition of “Bennie and the Jets” by Elton John sitting next to “Super Rich Kids” by Frank Ocean which samples the famous rendition of “Bennie and the Jets”.

Today I got that thing that you need, to get pushed to go harder. Listening to Larry Mizell Jr.’s show today I thought about the hundreds of things I need to get going to keep on doing my job at a high level. It’s a powerful thing to get that jolt of energy. I want to deliver amazing radio, things people will remember, things that people will enjoy with their family and their friends. In my previous blog post I was just talking about a moment hearing De La Soul on KMOJ a solid 25 years ago, I remember it, I remember the energy. I remember where I was. I want to make those memories. Today I got rejuvenated on that journey by hearing a really stellar show from Larry Mizell Jr. Congrats to Larry and the show producer Sharlese. Find a hero, study them, enjoy it, and let it drive you to go harder.