KLOI- Gary Alexander - Classic Jazz

Joy Spring w/Gary Alexander

This Week: The first hour celebrates the 16th anniversary of this program, which debuted on KLOI-LP, on Friday, April 25, 2008. The first program surveyed (as we still do) songs written by composers with birthdays this week, as sung or played by artists with birthdays this week. For instance, we’ll close the 3:00 hour with two songbirds (Barbra and Ella) singing the songs of Rodgers and Hart, due to Lorenz Hart’s birthday this week (May 2). We begin the 4:00 hour with a 30-minute tribute to the centennial of singer Blossom Dearie (born April 28, 1924), starting with six Rodgers & Hart songs, then two live songs. Then we close our April month-long centennial tributes to two composers who defined West Coast jazz and film music; they were born two days apart in mid-April 1924. First, at 4:30, we close our tribute to Henry Mancini with his film scores and songs written from 1966 to 1986, and at 5:00, we sample the final four albums from 1958 to 1960 of Milton “Shorty” Rogers covering the works of WC Handy, Robert Allen, Harold Arlen and Tchaikovsky. In the final 15 minutes we sample the Bill Evans Trio in “Time Remembered” (from May 1963) with his new bassist, Chuck Israels, who went on to become jazz professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham from 1986 to 2010.