Hey y’all! It’s Tuesday, and that means it’s time once again for my weekly radio block on [datafruits.fm]!
Here’s what we’ve got rolling tonight…
Talkie Time BY REQUEST : The War Of The Worlds
And no, I am NOT kidding about the nation getting thrown into a panic. This is an actual newspaper article from The Lewiston Daily Sun in Lewiston, Maine on Oct 31, 1938; click the image above to check out the whole thing.
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his troupe at the Mercury Theater repertory company broadcast one of the most infamous radio plays ever aired.
Their interpretation of H.G. Wells’ “The War Of The Worlds”, interpreted live on-air as a faux real-world emergency broadcast, was so realistic that the cops got called, half the nation went into a state of panic, the FCC nearly barred them from the air, and the Mercury Theater earned themselves a sweet sponsorship from the Campbell Soup Company, eventually becoming “The Campbell Playhouse”.
By request by listener and datafruits chat member CommanderAIK (happy birthday, by the way!), we’ve got the full broadcast for you this evening. Take a break from the news and tune into something somehow less depressing. Y’know, like extraterrestrials invading Earth and bringing mankind to its knees in terror. Stiiiiill somehow less nerve-wracking than doom-scrolling Reddit.
And, if you have something you want to hear, either on Talkie Time or The Jazz Program, send me an email or hit me up on Discord if you’re in the Datafruits server; you might just hear your request on the air.
The Jazz Program : Sérgio Mendes And Friends - Cannonball’s Bossa Nova / Eartha Kitt With Sergio Mendez And Brazil ‘66 / Herb Alpert Presents Sergio Mendez And Brazil ‘66
(This program schedule was originally aired November 4, 2023.)
One of the hardest band photos in existence. And yes, of course I own this one in meatspace. Click the image there and bask in its vinyly glory.
If there’s one Brazilian jazz album I’d recommend that doesn’t include Jobim or Gilberto in the lineup, it’s Sergio Mendez and Brazil 66’s debut self-titled record.
Bearing the name of A&M’s notorious co-founder Herb Alpert on both the cover art and the producer’s slot on the liner notes (in what I imagine is an effort to move units after the runaway success of Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s “Whipped Cream And Other Delights”), this self-titled record blasted Mendes and company into the limelight and into the American jazz and easy-listening fan’s radar.
Thankfully, that isn’t the last we ever heard in the states from this Brazilian powerhouse, and we’ll be looking at two more Sergio’s records tonight–or, more specifically, two more of his collaborations.
He isn’t mentioned on the cover by name, but the 1962 classic Cannonball Adderly LP “Cannonball’s Bossa Nova” does in fact have our boy on piano with the Bossa Rio Sextet Of Brazil backing him up. We’ll be starting the evening there, and then heading to the aforementioned “Herb Alpert Presents Sergio Mendez And Brazil ‘66.” before closing up with a record that I can’t find that much about but that absolutely deserves a slot on this program regardless–Eartha Kitt’s “With Sergio Mendes & Brazil ‘66”1.
Aaand that’s it for this week! Unfortunately, we’re still on half-reruns this week, although I’m stoked to finally be able to get in our first listener request since the hiatus! And, again, please shoot me an email or hit me up on Discord if you’re in the Datafruits server if you have a radio play, musician, album, genre, or even a vibe you’d like to see us dive into on the air and in these writeups!
If you’re reading this the day of, and you can make it in tonight, come hang out in the chat with us on Datafruits! We’ve got a good crowd of folks in the chat every week, and whether you have a suggestion for a future show or just want to hang out and chat with fellow jazz enjoyers, you’re welcome here with us.
You’re all amazing and don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not. Stay safe out there, and I’ll see you back again next week. Same time, same station.
Footnotes…
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I actually did a bit more research on this one, and as best I can tell it seems to be a bootleg collection. The only entry I can find of it, however, is on MusicBrainz, which…isn’t usually something I use as a reliable research source, to say the least.
The fact that it is only on there, however, does kind of underscore that this is probably a bootleg–Musicbrainz primarily relies on user-submitted entries and doesn’t require as much proof or have as much back-checking or (the important part!) insistence upon physical or label-verified releases as Discogs does, which lends credibility to this being an Internet-only bootleg compilation that ended up in enough people’s collections to end up having its own ID3 tag submitted to MB. ↩︎