Hey, y’all! Hope you’re doing your best. It’s Tuesday again, and you know what that means–it’s once again time for Talkie Time and The Jazz Program on datafruits.fm! Read on below to find out what we’ll be playin’ this evening!
But First, Some Housekeeping…
JAZZY FUCKIN’ HOLIDAYS 2025 (albeit a week late for one of ’em)
This year's poster. It's our fifth year runnin, so I had to cook up somethin' special.
It’s that time of year once again, and this time it’s a big one. Year 5 of Jazzy Fuckin’ Holidays is underway, as we aired our first of two twenty-four hour marathons on Thanksgiving Day! We raised about two hundred bucks for Trans Lifeline, blasted jazz and soul form midnight to midnight, and had a fairly active and live chat all day as well.
I do apologize for not getting to a proper post about it this year (although I did announce it on Bsky and on Mastodon, so I guess that counts for something), but here’s your formal invitation to our Christmas Day one. We’ll be raising money for the Trevor Project, starting at midnight Christmas Eve and rolling till midnight, twenty four hours later.
If you don’t have a place to go for the holidays, you’re more than welcome to come hang with us. Tune in, make some friends, and enjoy a curated list of Christmas-music-free jazz, soul, and crooner tracks. No Mariah Carey in the bunch. That’s my Christmas promise to you.
And if you happen to dig the poster I cooked up this year, you’re in luck; the thing prints in black and white and in color, at 11x17 and 600 DPI. Here’s your black and white version, and here’s your color version.. They may take a second to load, but once they do, feel free to print ’em up and put ’em all over town.
A Quick Introduction To The Yearly Shrimpshakeco (tm) (c) (r) Company Mandated Holiday S.H.I.T. List
"OH SO YOU WERE NAUGHTY THIS YEAR HUH? DIDN'T SUBSCRIBE TO THE DATAFRUITS PATREON? DIDN'T TIP YOUR DJ OVER ON KOFI?? GUESS WHAT BUCKO-- YOU JUST MADE THE NAUGHTY LIST!!!" -- santa chris jericho, probably
As you all probably guessed, we aren’t playing any Christmas music this month on The Jazz Program, and we won’t be playin’ it any year, ever, on the regular program or Jazzy Fuckin’ Holidays.
To be honest, far too many years of menial jobs in the hospitality industry has rendered the concept of Christmas music abhorrent to me, to the point that i have virtually none in my collection at all. You can only take so many turns in the Mariah Carey Hell Rondo before you start to lose it a bit.
With that stated, we DO have a very special ahem corporate mandate from the all-powerful shrimpy deities over at Shrimp Shake Co. that we have to do at least something goofy for The Holiday Season.
In fact, we have an entire list worth of mandates. An entire datatable worth of seasonal happenings that we have to divvy out in installments, lest we get our incredibly lucrative Internet radio paychecks in the form of Spicy Shrimp Shakes poured into a goo bomb and dumped in our mailbox again.
It’s called the Seasonal Happenings Installments Table, and we’re taking one entry off of it every week this month and filling your radio with some holiday S.H.I.T.
…look man, you can complain if you want, but I’m still cleaning the habanero sauce and radioactive shrimp waste from last year’s “Christmas performance bonus” out of the cracks in the mail room door, and I reeeally don’t wanna do that again.
So, what’s on the S.H.I.T. list this year? What are we playing on The Jazz Program if we’re not blasting Mariah Carey like literally everyone else? Why doesn’t that cute bear of a mall Santa return my calls? Some of your answers lie below….so read on, and let’s get into it.
Talkie Time Presents The Holiday S.H.I.T. List : Rocky Fortune - The Plot To Murder Santa Claus / Pint Sized Payroll Bandit
(This program was originally aired December 5, 2023.)
"it's christmas, see. now you listen up, you're playing christmasy things and you're playin' 'em now, see, or i'll sick sammy davis jr. on ya, see"--frank sinatra, probably
Rocko Fortunato’s back on the program again, and this time he’s got the first in our four “crimes involving Santa Claus because it’s December and we’ve got to at least pretend we care about being seasonally appropriate” episodes.
Look, man, if it was good enough for every single radio and television program since forever, it’s good enough for us.
We’ll be showcasing one Christmas episode of some various crime drama program off of our Seasonal Happenings Installments Table every week this month, and once we’re done with that S.H.I.T. I’ll just pick one of the funnier named or more ridiculous episodes of each program to balance things out for us Grinches. Kosher? Kosher.
This week, our holiday S.H.I.T is “The Plot To Murder Santa Claus”, released on December 22, 1953. We’ll be washing it down right after with “Pint Size Payroll Bandit”, which originally aired on November 3, 1953, and which tells the story of a nine-year-old making off with an entire cash register’s worth of dough. In a way, this is seasonally appropriate too–just imagine how many PS5s you could nab with fifty grand in 1953 money.
The Jazz Program: Moe Koffman - Moe’s Curried Soul (1970) / Goes Electric (1967) / The Shepherd Swings Again (1957)
The first Moe Koffman record I ever owned, and so far the only one I own on vinyl--The Shepherd Swings Again, from 1957. Click the image to see this record in the flesh.
(This program was originally aired December 12, 2024.)
Moe Koffman is easily one of my favorite flautists in all of music–and that’s saying something, given how big of a Jethro Tull fan I am. (Don’t worry, no one’s dethroning my boy Ian.)
Playing with such big swingin’ names as Rob McConnell, Johnny Burt, and Howard Cable, it should be no surprise that when Moe got his own act some of the first things he did were swing records, including “The Shepherd Swings Again”, released in 1957.
Moe wasn’t a one-trick pony by any stretch of the definition, though, and in this episode of The Jazz Program we’ll be taking a look at two more of the many styles The Shepherd had in his repertoire.
From some soul-jazz on 1970’s “Moe’s Curried Soul”, to some ’60s psych-rock-adjacent noodling on 1968’s “Goes Electric”, Moe could do it all, and we’ll be going through it all tonight. Hope you can join us.
That about covers this week’s show! My apologies for the re-runs, but as always, I’d like to hope they’re good ones.
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..