Like any college radio station, we featured, and catered to, a wide assortment of tastes and trends. You might hear some classical in the morning, some hard rock late at night, with jazz, folk, hip-hop or Led Zeppelin in between.
I think jazz is a mainstay on most college stations; I know it had long been featured at my first station and a large amount of time was devoted to it at the second station I worked at. For many years before I even arrived, the jazz show at the first station ran weekdays mornings for three hours (6-9am); during my freshman year, jazz was temporarily scrapped for a series of morning shows that bombed, resulting in the reinstatement of the format. Because of its daypart, the program was called the Morning Oasis, a sort of sappy name in my book. As popular as the format was, we did not have a library to support it: it was small and full of unknown artists making mediocre music. Even our on-air liners (short promotional cuts identifying the station) that ran throughout the daily program were several years old when I arrived on the scene. One oft-played liner featured a montage of random jazz musicians saying hello. Something like:
You knew its days were numbered after that. Sure enough, the CD maxi-single, the one with the cow on the cover, soon disappeared from the jazz stacks. Thankfully, the rest of the music was thrown out as well in the following years when a new instructor joined the department who had a background in jazz and helped revitalize the entire format. With his help, my last year at that station saw the library of jazz CDs at least quadruple in size and it moving to a more pristine part of the day: 9am to 3pm, thereby becoming simply the Oasis. I’m told that in subsequent years after I graduated that the classical format was dropped altogether and jazz ran for nine full hours (6am-3pm).
Anyway, Some Cow Fonque still had its fans within the communication department and after the song disappeared from the radio station, it began appearing on more than one of the student-produced programs airing on the campus television station over the next few years.
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Some Cow Fonique (More Tea, Vigar?)
(Marsalis)
Buckshot LeFonque
From the album Buckshot LeFonque
1994
(instrumental)
I think jazz is a mainstay on most college stations; I know it had long been featured at my first station and a large amount of time was devoted to it at the second station I worked at. For many years before I even arrived, the jazz show at the first station ran weekdays mornings for three hours (6-9am); during my freshman year, jazz was temporarily scrapped for a series of morning shows that bombed, resulting in the reinstatement of the format. Because of its daypart, the program was called the Morning Oasis, a sort of sappy name in my book. As popular as the format was, we did not have a library to support it: it was small and full of unknown artists making mediocre music. Even our on-air liners (short promotional cuts identifying the station) that ran throughout the daily program were several years old when I arrived on the scene. One oft-played liner featured a montage of random jazz musicians saying hello. Something like:
“This is Howard Hemlock.”Then out of nowhere a woman slowly and calmly announced her incredibly long name:
“I’m Buster Kilpatrick.”
“Hi, this is Pat McFlannery.”
“This is Jackie Kolthayne.”
“This is Mary-Alice Winkin Onomatopoeia something-or-other.”The funny thing was we didn’t own a single CD by any of these artists. One artist we did play – a helluva lot of – was not really jazz, either. Buckshot LeFonque was a jazz-rock/hip-hop fusion group, a one-off project of Branford Marsalis, whose first album featured a rollicking groove piece called Some Cow Fonque (More Tea, Vicar?). Somehow the station had a promotional CD single version and the song got airtime whenever we needed a song to stretch to the top of the hour. Because it was a catchy and popular song, a lot of people tended to play it much more than it should have been. To that end, I remember one of the high-ranking professors in the communication department stopping by the control room one day, poking his head into the studio midway through the song, and telling the DJ "that song isn’t jazz.”
You knew its days were numbered after that. Sure enough, the CD maxi-single, the one with the cow on the cover, soon disappeared from the jazz stacks. Thankfully, the rest of the music was thrown out as well in the following years when a new instructor joined the department who had a background in jazz and helped revitalize the entire format. With his help, my last year at that station saw the library of jazz CDs at least quadruple in size and it moving to a more pristine part of the day: 9am to 3pm, thereby becoming simply the Oasis. I’m told that in subsequent years after I graduated that the classical format was dropped altogether and jazz ran for nine full hours (6am-3pm).
Anyway, Some Cow Fonque still had its fans within the communication department and after the song disappeared from the radio station, it began appearing on more than one of the student-produced programs airing on the campus television station over the next few years.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Some Cow Fonique (More Tea, Vigar?)
(Marsalis)
Buckshot LeFonque
From the album Buckshot LeFonque
1994
(instrumental)