*spoopy cat laff*
Hey, y’all! Hope you’re doing your best. It’s Tuesday again, and it’s still October! So, get ready for more of the October Spoopy Programming Block, where I turn my entire timeslot into the spoopiest place to be for the entirety of Halloween month!
We’ve got some great radio dramas and some interesting jazz-adjacent records picked out to get you all into the Halloween spirit this year, so read on down to learn more about what we’re playing tonight on datafruits.fm!
E&S tracked down a slightly different cover art piece to The Burning Court, but I wanted to highlight the 1954 Bantam edition's cover, featuring some gorgeous brushwork by English-American pulp illustrator Charles Binger.
Talkie Time Gets Spoopy With It, Part 2: Suspense – The Burning Court / Wet Saturday
(This program was originally aired October 3, 2023.)
It’s October, and the spooks, thrills, and murders are still out here taking over the airwaves for Talkie Time. Every single day this month, we’re playing some spooooopy stuff for you, and this week we’ve got a selected re-run from the faraway haunted land of 2023, where we played nothing but Suspense for the entire month of October.
I want to give a major shoutout to Escape And Suspense! here–they’ve done a lot of the ground work for me when it comes to giving the entire set of surviving Suspense episodes their due diligence, and I’d be a terrible old time radio head if I didn’t link their writeups for these episodes here for you to peruse.
Suspense isn’t a series I’ve spent too much time with–I’m much more of a Phillip Marlowe and Broadway Is My Beat kinda gal, as you all know–so if you want the words of someone who knows what they’re on about, go give their writeups (and the rest of their blog!) a read. Both of the cooresponding writeups for each episode on their site are linked below.
This week, we’ve got "The Burning Court", originally aired on June 17, 1942 and based on John Dickinson Carr’s novel of the same name (again, Escape And Suspense covers this on their blog—click that link!!–and they tracked down a lot of the details on the original books and serial publications these episodes are often based on).
After that, we’ve got "Wet Saturday", based on John Collier’s short of the same name, which originally aired the following week on June 24, 1942.
How TKDE got their start.
The Jazz Program Gets Spoopy With It, Part 2 : The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble - Here Be Dragons (2009) / From The Stairwell (2011)
(This program was originally aired October 17, 2023.)
Buckle the fuck up, kids, cuz we’re leaving the spoopy gurus behind in favor of dragons this week. Dragons, and–possibly more terrifying!–stairs. (No pushing, please.)
Formed in 1999, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble is so far up my alley it’s almost comical–hell, they originally started as a project dedicated to scoring silent movies, and we all know how I feel about old-timey television and radio.
Sadly, they’re not with us anymore (they disbanded in 2013) but their music lives on, and while I couldn’t manage to track down their accompaniments to F.W. Murnau’s "Nosferatu" or Fritz Lang’s "Metropolis", I do in fact have copies of both 2009’s Youtube-recommendation-core[^4] classic "Here Be Dragons" and 2011’s "From The Stairwell", and that’s what we’ve got in the pipe for you this evening.
(Oh, and if you happen to have a recording of their silent film work…then what are you waiting for, man? For the love of god, email me that shit! We NEED that one for viz for next year’s Halloween!)
That’s all for this week! My apologies for the reruns, but I did at least want to include one piece from the 2023 Halloween calendar (since those show schedules are no longer on the site) and the day job has been keeping me insanely busy. As always, thank you so much for reading, and I do hope you enjoy tonight’s show.
Speaking of which: if you’re reading this the day of, and you can make it in tonight, you should 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: on datafruits dot fm..