To the editors:
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First, WNUA doesn’t really have to play any jazz. That they do is certainly their acknowledgment of the debt owed to the jazz art for their appropriation of the sophisticated air attached to that musical genre. WNUA plays jazz-based and popular instrumental music, which is exceptional in that the jazz-based instrumental format is a marked departure for a commercial radio station. Until the advent of the “New Adult Contemporary” format, only the occasional instrumental song was included in a radio universe inhabited mainly by the pop vocalist.
And thirdly, the African American improvisational traditions in blues and jazz have always been sites of oppositional cultural expression and resistance. In jazz improvisation this often meant taking old songs or contemporary popular songs and completely reinterpreting them or creating entirely new musical forms which were often appropriated by mainstream pop (and this is part of what makes WNUA so problematic).
John Hill
