I’ve spent the evening listening (as I have a couple nights this week) to Bob Parlocha’s show on KJazz, which has been really helpful to get me through the scary beginnings of some necessary spring cleaning.  The sad thing is that Bob passed away last week, and they are obviously playing tapes of his past shows.

Over the past years, I heard his show late at night and always loved the hip tunes he played but it wasn’t until major changes at KKJZ in recent years made his choice of material stand out like a beacon of straight-ahead and progressive jazz.  Took me a while to realize he was being piped in from off-campus, and it wasn’t until I went looking for his playlists online that I discovered that.  The more I listened to him, I found that he played some of the hippest stuff of anybody I know in jazz radio (reminiscent of the stuff I used to get on Fresno’s KFSR and KPFA radio by Joe Moore, Leonard Longmire, David Aus, Vince DiCicco, and Kent Stratford).

I understand that Bob was a musician himself, which probably speaks volumes about why he could relate to the music so well and choose material that satisfies the tastes of other musicians and not just the typical “best of”-type stuff most DJ’s are forced to play these days so as not to scare off the average listener.  Not only did he play good stuff, he ALWAYS  listed the personnel and offered commentary and trivial facts about the recordings.  It’s only now that I wish I’d listened to his shows more, and I can only hope they keep playing his back log of recorded shows for a while.

To close this post, I just want to copy the portion of the incredible playlist that I have heard just tonight alone, if for nothing else to remind myself how much I dug everything I heard (some of which have been long-lost favorites of mine like the Dexter Gordon album referenced). Listening to music like this puts me back in touch with what I listened to when I first fell in love with jazz (I can thank the DJs mentioned above for much of that).

Thanks Bob!

March 28, 2015