Heard about this at the same time as everybody else in the Rice community apparently heard about it:
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=14643
Boy, my day is ruined. I understand the business reasons behind it, but it sucks.
Some general history can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTRU
My first memories of KTRU were of the Jazz Show (running every Sunday from 1974 to present!). KUHF, the local NPR affilicate (and the buyer of KTRU now) was a jazz station, but they played a fairly narrow, safe range of jazz. I used to listed to KUHF in the hours when they weren't running All Things Considered and the like during the week, but on Sundays, I switched over to KTRU. As a budding jazz artist (never made it out of that stage!), KTRU blew my mind by playing Eric Dolphy, Brecker Brothers, John McGlaughlin, John Coltrane's post-bop music, and the really strange stuff of Carla Bley, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, etc. While I did not like all of it (and still don't), it was great that I could turn on the radio to hear this stuff my teachers were telling me about at HSPVA.
When I went to Rice, my good friend Jeff Erickson was the Saturday 7-10 AM DJ. He talked to me about the radio, and I was irresistibly drawn to it. He took me to a staff meeting, and I was introduced to the jazz director. The show was going through a smooth jazz phase, but I immediately started playing stuff I liked. That spring, I was made Jazz Director. Alas, my first job was to let people go from the show who weren't even playing smooth jazz.
That summer, the person who had been slated to be the classical director decided to quit, so they gave me both shows. Well, summers are tough at college radio, and I had no DJs. I did 6 hours of classical on Saturdays, and 7.5 hours of jazz. Was a long summer!
At the time, Houston had no classical radio station. That changed in the fall, when KUHF switched its music format to classical instead of jazz. We decided to drop KTRU's classical show, but the jazz show became much more interesting. KTSU played some jazz, but once again, it was of the smooth jazz variety.
I convinced Kevin Long to come DJ for me that year. Together, we played a lot of modern jazz, as well as rebroadcasting Rice Jazz Band concerts (of which we were both members!). We started getting interesting records from the record companies again, as well as some ticket giveways.
The next year, I recruited Vince Kargatis as a DJ. We also had some fill-in work from Ann Marley. I am proud of the shows we put together; they were fun.
During all of this, I occasionally subbed for a regular DJ here and there. The playlist was a lot of stuff I had never heard of, and was not generally fond of (thanks, Ray Shea!), but there was some music in there which I really dug, that I would never have been exposed to otherwise.
Once Christmas, I was subbing for Jeff on Saturday, and was running the whole 7.5 hour show on Sunday. I arrived Saturday morning at 6:45, and the Rice Memorial Center was locked. However, there was a sign, and a long trunk of cables coming out of a window feeding to the vestibule of the Rice Chapel, where there was a hastily assembled studio with a portable turntable setup, and about 300-400 records. They were doing asbestos removal in the RMC, and never bothered to tell anybody, so the KTRU staff had about 30 minutes to set all of this up! They did not grab any jazz records, so on Sunday, I cycle through my entire collection of jazz records, which at the time, was about 12 discs. I repeated Giant Steps and Kind of Blue! It was freezing in there as well.
We were down the hall from Willy's Pub at that point in time. One time, I was in the pub, and they had the radio on. Ray Shea was in the pub as well. At that point, we only had 3 Public Service Announcements on the queue, and one of them was about testicular cancer screening and MD Anderson. We were all really tired of that one, as it came up once every 3 hours! So, the poor DJ was reading this, and Ray yelled out as loud as he could something like "F*&( that s*(&!", stormed to the radio, repeated the epithet on the air, and ripped the card off of its holder in mid-sentence. The DJ stammered something about "Well, uh, just call MD Anderson. Let's play some music!"
The radio was a wonderful experience, and I am sad that current and future Rice students won't get to participate in it. It was organic, eclectic, original, and a wealth of culture from slightly off-center. It reflected the student body well. I know it will be available online (at least for a while), but you know, getting that phone call from a lonely teenager asking you questions about the music, or an old teacher, or a musician visiting Houston putting in a request... Those are things that are gone forever.
