If it’s December, it’s Orgy season at WHRB.
(Fall 2010 schedule here.)
Not to get technical about it, but the old ‘HRB orgies were better than the present ones.
Back in the day, the orgies were, well, orgiastic – 90 consecutive hours of John Coltrane in 1990, 207 consecutive hours of Johann Sebastian Bach in 2000, eight hours of Jazz Puns in 2009, which also featured seven days (129+ hours) of live Grateful Dead performances, a ten-day stretch of Franz Joseph Haydn’s music, and a five-day Dylan Alphabetical Orgy.
This fall, though, it feels like WHRB is chopping up the orgies to fit the station’s normal programming schedule: jazz in the morning, classical in the afternoon, whatever at night.
Or is the hardworking staff just not listening hard enough?
You tell us.
Campaign Outsider 
Sir, don’t be hatin’ on the Koprivshtitsa orgy. Don’t be punnin’ on that either.
PS I did not make that name up!!! it was on there!!!
No worry there.
Your right. I still have a a reel to reel tape I made off the ” Jazz Avant Garde” orgy in 1968. I checked the most recent orgy schedule and there wasn’t much.
The closest thing I’ve heard recently is on WKCR (Columbia) which pre-empts its regular programming on the birthdays of some jazz musicians.
Actually, December was never the month for orgies at WHRB — January was.
Harvard recently shifted their entire academic calendar earlier so that they can hold first semester exams in late December instead of late January, which caused the orgy season to become a Hannukah and pre-Christmas bash.
Also, the WHRB orgies have always tried to fit the shorter ones into the traditional time slots for that genre of music; it’s a logical practice so to minimize disruptions to daily schedules for regular listeners. It’s the long orgies that require deviation from the programming schedule — but they only take up part of the orgy season.
Thanks, Michael. Very informative. But as far as long ones vs. short – they just split the Jones Bros. orgy into three when it could have worked much better as a continuous program. At least it seemed that way to me.
WHRB once sent out a program booklet with a detailed list of the classical music to be played during the upcoming month (this was WAY before the internet). The first page listed the personnel at the station, and one person was called the Orgy(tm) director; his or her parental units must have been so proud.
As it’s January, I was thinking about the 1990 Coltrane orgy and found this. I agree that the old format was vastly superior. I learned so much about JC during that orgy that could only have obtained in that format! Same thing with the Tom Waits orgy in January 1998. I miss it so much.
Yeah, I miss them too. I have six or seven dozen audio cassettes – Monk, Coltrane, Roy Haynes, Village Vanguard, Dexter Gordon – that I just guerrilla-taped whenever I was at home. Progress – feh.