WPKN Music, Arts, and Culture Podcast

Nate Hilts of the Dead South checks in with WPKN's Martha Nachman (The Music Never Stopped) ahead of the Dead South's 10/24 performance at College Street Music Hall.

Jason Kao Hwang discusses his early training and eventual emergence in New York’s improv loft scene. He discusses the Asian American music movement, his mentors, and the use of the electric violin. Jason has worked as a violinist with innumerable new music legends including Anthony Braxton, William Parker, Henry Threadgill, Tomeka Reid, Wadada Leo Smith, Joëlle Léandre and many others. He has received support from Chamber Music America, Rockefeller Foundation, US Artists International and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and others. 

WPKN's Rich Kaminsky, host of Off-Beat! airing Saturdays, 2 a.m. – 6 a.m., interviews singer and artist, Exene Cervenka ahead of X's last national tour and new album, Smoke and Fiction.

The Courettes join WPKN's Howard Thompson (PURE) discussing their fourth tour of the US in conjunction with the release of their new album THE SOUL OF THE FABULOUS COURETTES...

Jim Reid, singer/songwriter, lead singer, and co-founder (with brother William Reid) for The Jesus and Mary Chain, chats with WPKN's Herman Olivera (ReHumanize Yourself Radio) ahead of the group's WPKN Presents performance at College Street Music Hall on Tuesday, October 1st at 7PM. In partnership with Premier Concerts and Manic Presents.

Tim Butler, bassist, and co-founder of the English rock band the Psychedelic Furs, chats with WPKN's Herman Olivera (ReHumanize Yourself Radio) ahead of the group's WPKN Presents performance at College Street Music Hall on Tuesday, October 1st at 7PM. In partnership with Premier Concerts and Manic Presents.

WPKN programmer Valerie Richardson speaks with artist Iyaba Ibo Mandingo about his exhibition Arwe Journey: Twentieth-Century Afri-Caribbean Migration, which will be on view at the Housatonic Museum of Art from Weds. Sept. 18, 2024, through Feb. 21, 2025. In the 61 paintings in this exhibition, the artist Iyaba Ibo Mandingo tells the story of the 20th-century Afri-Caribbean migration to Europe and North America. Arwe Journey takes its inspiration from Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration series and August Wilson’s plays. The exhibition will be accompanied by many special programs including performances of poetry and storytelling by the artist himself. Also joining the conversation were co-curators Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, director of the Housatonic Museum of Art, and Suzanne Kachmar, director of Bridgeport’s City Lights Gallery. On a side note, Valerie chose to end the interview segment with a snipper of the songPush Back Your Bam-Bam by the Calypso Antiguan artist King Short Shirt. Iyaba was delighted to hear this song and shared after the interview that his mother worked as a backup singer with King Short Shirt.

Azerbaijani jazz pianist, Amina Figerova, is interviewed by WPKN's Richard Epstein of "Sometimes Classical" ahead of her "Jazz At The Post" appearance on Thursday, June 6th at 7:30pm in Westport, CT.

Bryan Munar, Orpheus in the upcoming touring production of Hadestown, talks with WPKN's Valerie Richardson ahead of the Hadestown theatrical debut at the Waterbury Palace Theater, October 3-6.

WPKN Director of Operations and New Initiatives (and filmmaker) Brendan Toller sits down with Artistic Director / Founder Jason Coombs of the Bridgeport Film Festival, and Filmmakers Nilsa Laine and Brian A. Russell for a preview of the 2024 festival.

Nilsa Laine is the Director of "Undergraduate Experiences of Black Women at PWI Campuses" [14.57] a short documentary exploring the undergraduate experiences of Black Women - touching on freshman experience, intersectionality, and 'Black Girl Magic.'

Brian Russell is the Director of SilverSizzle [13.35] a short described as: a cemetery caretaker embarks on a quest to help two recent widowers find new love among widows visiting their departed spouses.

https://www.bridgeportfilmfest.org/

Kevin Gallagher talks with Michael Pillot, Festival Organizer of the Big Chief Donald Harrison Jr's Quantum Leap Festival, Nola2Nofo, happening Friday 9/13 through Sunday 9/15 at Borghese Vineyard, 17150 Middle Road Cutchogue, NY 11935

Funk, blues, jazz, hip-hop, zydeco, swampadelic guitar - the music and culture of New Orleans hits Long Island wine country. WPKN partners on this festival featuring a staggering lineup of New Orleans greats including Fred Wesley of the JBs, Sonny Landreth, Preservation Hall Legacy Band, Cyril Neville, CJ Chenier & The Red Hot Louisiana Band and so many more. Could this be NOLA JazzFest east in years to come?

Singer/songwriter Amy Rigby details her new album "Hang In There With Me" and following US tour with WPKN's Martha Willette Lewis.

Americana/folk duo Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams chat with Jim Motavalli ahead of their 2024 CT Folk Fest appearance Saturday, September 7th, at New Haven's Edgerton Park.

This interview features Erica Gies author of Water Always Wins, Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge(winner of the Rachel Carson Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism) and jazz bassist Stephan Crump who was inspired by the book to write an 18-part suite called Slow Water.The two are joined by WPKN's Jim Motavalli.

WPKN's Jim Motavalli interviews Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers ahead of their 2024 Rhythm and Roots appearance in Rhode Island and amidst their Southern Rock Opera Revisited Tour.

Cory Younts of Old Crow Medicine Show is interviewed by WPKN's Jim Motavalli ahead of the group's 2024 Rhythm and Roots, Rhode Island appearance and a 2024 tour.

Bob Mould (Hüsker Dü) talks with artist/musician Mike Cooper (The Defcon Five, The Hymans) ahead of Bob's solo electric date Wednesday, September 11, 2024, 7:30 PM at The Kate in Old Saybrook, CT.

WPKN and Musician's Speakhost and DJ Joseph Celli interviews composer and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis during amidst a 2024 tour with the Messethics featuring members of DC DIY pioneers, Fugazi.

“James Brandon Lewis, a jazz saxophonist in his 30s, raw-toned but measured, doesn’t sound steeped in current jazz-academy values and isn’t really coming from a free-improvising perspective. There’s an independence about him, and on “Days of FreeMan” (Okeh), he makes it sound natural to play roaming, experimental funk, with only the electric bassist Jamaladeen Tacuma and the drummer Rudy Royston, and without much sonic enhancement. The record sounds a little reminiscent of what James Blood Ulmer and Ornette Coleman were doing in the late ’70s and early ’80s — on records that included Mr. Tacuma — but it’s not clearly evoking a particular past. Maybe it’s an improvised take on early ’90s hip-hop, as Mr. Lewis has suggested, but it sounds less clinical than that. It sounds like three melodic improvisers going for it.”
— The New York Times

Singer/Songwriter/Producer, Jon Auer (Posies, Big Star, Big Star Quintet), joins Richard Epstein of Sometimes Classical and WPKN's Director of Operations & New Initiatives, Brendan Toller, in the WPKN studios for an interview and performance. Auer discusses his musical origins, "power-pop," Big Star, Alex Chilton, Jody Stephens, his intruiging musical connections to William Shatner and Ringo Starr and much more. 

Andy Zax is an American music historian and a producer of music reissues. 

As a producer of boxed sets and archival music reissues, Zax has been responsible for restoring and remastering the catalogues of Talking Heads, Rod Stewart, Echo & The Bunnymen, Television, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, The Sisters Of Mercy, David Axelrod and Lee Hazlewood, among others. His reissues of once-obscure cult favorites such as Television's Marquee Moon, John Cale's Paris 1919, Judee Sill and Heart Food by Judee Sill have successfully brought those albums to larger audiences that had eluded them upon their initial release, while his exploration of record company tape vaults has yielded discoveries such as the lost masters of Johnny Mathis's 1981 Chic-produced I Love My Lady.

In late 2005, Zax visited a Warner Brothers tape storage space in Los Angeles and encountered dozens of boxes of one-inch eight-track recordings from the Woodstock Festival. "From the moment I saw those tapes", he said, "I was like, 'Oh my God, there's so much more than I'd ever thought'", he said. "It was clear to me that no one was exploring this stuff and dealing with it in totality. Here was this vast trove of material not treated correctly."

In 2009, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, Zax produced the boxed set Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm, for which he was nominated for a Grammy for Best Historical Album.