Alysa Stryker, Staff Writer -

Although it is rare to live in a place where independent music streams freely — with only eight full-time jazz stations left broadcasting in the country — Greece is lucky enough to say that it houses one of them. Jazz90.1 is one of the last independent stations to still streamline jazz on a full-time basis.

Derrick Lucas, music director at Jazz90.1, mulls through anywhere from 50 to 100 submissions that are sent to the station at Greece Olympia High School each week. The musicians are an atypical, avant-garde bunch, ranging from local college students to singers and songwriters from around the world, including artists from Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Lucas listens carefully, cover to cover, looking for a delicate balance between old classic sounds like John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie to new, young and local trendsetters.

Aside from a wide range of jazz, the stations also provide extensive ethnic programming, including the Lithuanian program “Dainos Aidas,” the German program “Polka Bandstand Show” and Italian show “Pronto Italia.” On Dec. 4, it will add a third Spanish program to its lineup, with the addition of “La Nueva Era,” hosted by veteran Rochester DJ Freddy Colón.

The station’s motto — “take jazz further” — means playing a steady stream of jazz roots while also pushing the status quo to find artists who are straddling the line of old-fashioned and contemporary.

Why are only eight full-time jazz stations still left in the country? Rob Linton, station manager at Jazz90.1, says it’s simple: Jazz is not a money maker.

“Corporate radio stations know they can make more money with country or top 40 or things like National Public Radio,” said Linton.

But Rochester is a hub of jazz-obsessed listeners, says Linton, to the point where they are willing to fully fund a station like Jazz90.1 during semi-annual fundraising efforts. Although the station is located in Greece Olympia, it is funded solely by pledge drives and other fundraising events, not taxpayers.

“Rochester is a huge jazz town, and the jazz festivals are proof of that every year. That tells us that there is a huge audience out there,” said Linton.

Despite the rough economic times, the station is still receiving enough added support and pledge donations to stay fully afloat.

“These are listeners that care about the music enough and love the music. People are die-hard jazz fans here,” said Linton.

The station, which began in 1973, is not student run; however, high school students in Greece schools have the unique chance to use the equipment and create local public service announcements for their classwork.

Alexandria Pakitsas, a 12th grader at Olympia High School, spent time in the studio, learning the equipment and bulking up her skill set before she heads off to college for a career in broadcast communications. Pakitsas is one of many Greece students who had a unique opportunity as a high school student, with both a state-of-the-art audio-recording facility and television facility all in one location.“It opened a new world; I’ve never really used this type of technology,” said Pakitsas. “I’m trying to study broadcasting now because I like it so much.”

Linton says one of the stand-out details of the station is its ability to stay hyper-local and community-based, while most other stations are preplanned, prerecorded and less intimate.

“Radio is so corporate, there is no community aspect to it now,” said Linton. “We’re very community-oriented. My staff is live here, with live people on the radio 18 or 24 hours a day. Many stations send voices in pretending they’re from other places. We don’t do that here; we’re all live.”

July 1, 2009 – Meaghan M. McDermott • Staff writer •  Democrat & Chronicle – After a five-decade career, radio man Jack Mindy is hanging up his headphones. Mindy, 66, has spent the past eight years manning the mike at Greece’s Jazz 90.1, also known as WGMC-FM (90.1), but his career started in high school. “There was this little radio station in Fredonia looking for high school kids to do a radio show,” said Mindy, a native of Buffalo. “So I sent in a post card and that was it. I started playing disc jockey.”During a recent afternoon show at Jazz 90.1, Mindy alternated between loading fresh CDs of jazz tracks, giving weather reports and updates on the ongoing Rochester Jazz Festival, and taking phone calls from well-wishing listeners who had just heard of his retirement.

“All the calls are nice and flattering,” he said. “But I’ve been in the biz long enough and lost jobs enough times to know it takes a week and a half for them to forget you.”

Over the years, Mindy has traversed the airwaves from Syracuse to San Francisco. He started out in Top 40, with stints on small local stations in Erie, Ithaca and Geneva, then went to spinning platters on WTRX-AM (1330) in Flint, Mich.

Working there one summer in the mid 1960s, he did a live remote show from a gas station every Friday afternoon, sitting 20 feet in the air atop the price sign while the radio station provided refreshments – hot dogs and Mountain Dew.

On his Web site, Mindy says he hasn’t touched a Mountain Dew since.
From there, he returned to his home with a stint on WYSL-AM (1040), then to WIXZ-AM (1360) in Pittsburgh, where he picked up the nom de radio “Glen Shannon.”

Then, it was off to St. Louis for a run on now-defunct KXOK-AM (630), to KNEW-FM (910) in San Francisco, back to WHEN-AM (620) in Syracuse and then to WJR-AM (760).

Mindy has run every format from Top 40 to Adult Contemporary to Talk.
“I’m one of a dying breed,” he said, loading another compact disc into a player and queuing up the next song. “In the days where I was doing what I did, it was really lots of fun.

“But that’s all gone now, everything’s on computers and it’s mechanical and not challenging now. The whole world changed around radio and we ain’t going to go back to the days of people like me.”

He said our culture suffers for the changes.

“It’s a shame we don’t have the kind of common music library we had 20, 30 years ago,” he said. “There are just too many sources now, nobody counts anymore. It’s a loss of a common language.”

Mindy, of Webster, said that, while he’s going off the air, he’s going to keep his gig as Jazz 90.1′s operations manager.

“I enjoy the desk job,” he said. “It’s kind of a new experience for me to do something tangible.”

Mindy will sign off the air for the last time as afternoon host on July 6. Former Jazz 90.1 station manager and disc jockey Eric Gruner will take over the 3 to 6 p.m. slot on July 7. Mindy said he’s ready to get out of the studio and enjoy a little extra free time.

“You know, you’ve got to stop and smell a few roses at some point,” he said.

Alan Morrell – Staff Writer

Derrick Lucas got into jazz at a young age. He was just 4 years old when he asked his parents for his first record – Spectrum, by jazz drummer Billy Cobham. Cobham’s sound, he said, changed his young life. “I never heard anything like that,” said Lucas, now 38 and the music director for WGMC-FM (90.1) radio. “I went crazy.” Thus began his lifelong love of jazz, one he has shared through WGMC, a jazz-centered station celebrating its 35th anniversary this month. The station signed on in 1973 as a student-run station, run by the Greece Central School District that broadcast for 4½ hours on weekdays, but was off the air on weekends and school breaks.WGMC has evolved to an around-the-clock independent station with a $180,000 budget and five paid employees, along with about 30 volunteers. The broadcast studio originally was at Greece Athena High School, but has moved to Olympia High. The school district still holds the broadcast license.

“We started out with 10 watts, and you were lucky if you could hear us in Greece,” said station manager Rob Linton, who has worked at WGMC for four years.

The station now broadcasts over 15,000 watts, and live Internet streams make WGMC accessible throughout the world.

Listeners from Japan, China, Sweden, Mexico and Israel, among other locales, have contacted the station or sent pledges, Lucas said. WGMC is one of fewer than 10 stations in the United States with a jazz format, he said.

Tom Christian of Perinton noticed WGMC years ago. Christian, who said he tunes in daily, wasn’t a jazz fan before he found WGMC.

“I wouldn’t say I was really knowledgeable about jazz until I listened to this station,” said Christian, 65. “There were no jazz radio stations. But their knowledgeable DJs, they educate you.”

The format is mainly, but not all, jazz. Being an independent station has allowed WGMC to experiment.

“When we started, it was free-form, with everything from Doris Day to Miles Davis to a bluegrass show,” said Lucas, who has been with WGMC for 19 years. WGMC still has a weekly polka show, a Latin Essence show and other non-jazz shows.

Radio programming on commercial stations has changed much over the years, Linton said, as large corporations have bought several stations and fragmented them to specific genres. On-air personalities frequently are recorded in other parts of the country, with their voices piped into local markets, Linton said.

That’s a modus operandi WGMC has never espoused. Linton and Lucas said they want no part of it.

“We say, ‘Here’s a list of suggestions,’ but each DJ can create their own personality,’” Lucas said. “The way commercial radio is now, they’re trying to get rid of that, and it’s sad.”

Radio’s biggest challenge now comes from the iPod and other forms of technology that allow listeners to program their own selections, Lucas said. But there’s nothing like the give-and-take between live radio personalities and listeners, Linton said.

“We’ve had people say, ‘Thank God we found you.’ We’ve gotten comments from soldiers in Iraq,” he said.

“That’s when you realize, it’s all worth it.”

AMORRELL@DemocratandChronicle.com

Greece, N.Y. – The small radio station WGMC-FM has found supporters in its hometown, Greece. And in Athens, Greece. While that station – now Jazz 90.1 – only reaches about 50 miles from it headquarters, Greece Olympia High School, 1139 Maiden Lane, it can be heard all over the world these days thanks to the Internet. All jazz all the time.“As our reach has grown, so have our volunteers,” said music director Derric Lucas. Lucas, 38, remembers going over to other’s houses as a tot and wanting to “play DJ.” He liked all kinds of music, but he was particularly interested in jazz.

“Since I was a little kid, I always wanted to be on the radio,” he said.

When he was just 12 he applied for a job at a local radio station. He wanted to work the Sunday night shift. But he’d have to wait a few years.

“They wouldn’t let me work overnights as a seventh grader,” he chuckled. “After I graduated, I called back and the position was still open.”

Lucas joined WGMC-FM (90.1) in 1988 at the age of 19. When he started at the station it was mostly playing smooth jazz with folk music and a Lithuanian-language program.

Thirty-five years ago the station played “everything under the sun,” said current station manager Rob Linton.

That was when the station was run by students at Greece Athena.

After a few years, it moved to Apollo Middle School (the former Cardinal Mooney High School) and then to its current location, Greece Olympia.

Greece Central funded the station until about 25 years ago. It is still owned by the district but relies solely on donations, 30 volunteers and five paid staffers to keep it going. The annual operating budget is $185,000.

The station tries to raise from $100,00 to $140,000 through its two pledge drives every year.

The music is all jazz. “There are a lot of jazz stations that have gone off the air,” Linton said.

The biggest change over the years is the audience. It’s bigger.

When it first started at Athena, it was only a 10-watt station, which would reach no farther than Greece. It has since increased to 15,000 watts and reaches a 50-mile radius.

Because of the Internet, the station can be heard by people all over the world.

“It has opened up a new kind of channel to be able to reach out to people who can’t hear jazz on the radio,” he said.

Linton said that they have received donations from both Greece, NY and Athens, Greece. They’ve also received letters from soldiers in Iraq who enjoy jazz music.

One thing that hasn’t changed is WGMC’s dedication to teaching students about radio.

The broadcasting curriculum at Greece Olympia has allowed students to learn what it takes to run a radio station.

The interest in this type of class has skyrocketed since its inception in fall 2007 when only 10 students were enrolled, Linton said. This year, there are about 34 students enrolled in the class, not only from Olympia, but from Odyssey and Athena high schools.

“Teaching is one of the most important things a radio station can do,” Linton said.

Colleen M. Farrell, staff writer

(March 20, 2008) Greece, N.Y. – Spin the radio dial around, away from the three-digit station numbers on the right, and you’ll land on one of the last vestiges of old-time radio, back when disc jockeys were local and callers could actually talk to the person spinning records.
WGMC-FM (90.1), or Jazz 90.1, has pieces of radio’s golden age – back before consolidation and conglomeration and syndicated morning shows took over – all around its studio inside Greece Olympia High School.
Sure, computers and multi-disc stereos are used to play the songs. The station is even broadcast over the Internet. But next to the alphabetized rows of 15,000 CDs, a few shelves are devoted to albums and even a couple turntables left to play them. The record players get a ton of questions from the kids who come in for a tour, said station manager Rob Linton.

One thing this small station and its bigger counterparts share is the need for money. But where the big guns thrive on advertising, WGMC stays in operation because of donations from true fans of the jazz and ethnic music the station broadcasts.
And from those who just like to listen to a familiar voice.

Tune in and you’ll hear John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald and all the other greats along with new music from new artists. But Linton said what really sets it apart from other stations is the people: Real people who tell listeners what the weather is like in Rochester, take requests and talk live.

The lack of a tape delay has led to a couple goofs, but nothing too serious, Linton said. Mostly you might hear a program host ramble on a bit or mispronounce a name. But listeners love it because it means the hosts are human, he said.

“That kind of personal radio is non-existent,” Linton said.

Though its programs include polka, German songs, Lithuanian-language programs and other kinds of music, it always comes back to jazz.

“We’re actually one of the last full-time jazz stations in the country. We’re one of 10,” said Linton, 28.

The station, which turns 35 this fall, only recently has landed in the radar of a wider audience of jazz and radio lovers. It started as a 10-watt station run by students at Greece Athena. After a few years, it moved to Apollo Middle School (the former Cardinal Mooney High School) and operated out of a tiny room that used to be a nun’s kitchen. Its current home is at Greece Olympia and the station is now 15,000 watts.
Lynda Wildman of Greece is glad she found it.

“It’s the best time I’ve had in years,” said Wildman, 54, who volunteers as a DJ.
She hadn’t been a big jazz fan when she started. Neither was Linton, who recalls randomly picking out music and finding pieces he liked when he played them. Since she began volunteering in the summer, though, Wildman has been bitten by the jazz bug.

“I’ve been working my way through the library,” she said.

Phil Dodd, another DJ, loved his time volunteering at Jazz 90.1 so much that he moved a mile down the road so he could be closer. Dodd, 60, remembers his first show 13 years ago. He picked out some songs, pushed the right buttons, and said to himself: “This is great.”

Greece Central used to fund the station but that stopped about 25 years ago. It’s still owned by the district but relies solely on donations, 30 volunteers and four paid staff to keep it going. The operating budget is $185,000, “which is pennies compared to what other radio stations have. But for us, it’s huge,” Linton said.

The station tries to raise between $100,00 to $140,000 through its two pledge drives every year. This year’s spring pledge drive, which started this week, is going a bit slow, but Linton said it will keep going until $50,000 is raised.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been some notable fundraising going on. During last weekend’s Polka Bandstand Show, hosted by Ray Serafin and Al Meilutis, the station took in nearly $6,000 in a one-hour show. That might be a new record, Linton said. But most of the support comes from small donations, like $5 or $10, rather than large ones, he said.

Linton knows times are tough and that there are plenty of other charities and nonprofits competing for money. What Jazz 90.1 offers, he said, is community. Greece high school students make public service announcements and air them on the radio. Volunteers stuff envelopes, take calls, play music and do everything in between.

Finally, Linton said, the station is getting the respect it deserves. And the community gets to own a little piece of it all.

“And it’s something that they can turn on the radio and say, ‘I had something to do with that,’” he said.

For more information, call (585) 966-2660 or head to www.jazz901.org.

Colleen M. Farrell can be reached at (585) 394-0770 Ext. 265 or at cfarrell@mpnewspapers.com.

Jazz station WGMC moves into Olympia High media center

Victoria E. Freile, Staff writer

(June 15, 2005) — GREECE — Until recently, many Olympia High School students didn’t know the Greece Central School District housed a radio station.In fact, many still don’t know much about it.
Last month, a radio and television studio opened in the school’s new library and media center. At the same time, the staff of the predominantly jazz station WGMC-FM (90.1), which goes by Jazz 90.1, moved to the new facility.

The library/media center was part of the district’s $119.5 million capital improvement project approved by Greece voters in June 2000. The station was previously housed in a converted kitchen in Apollo Middle School.

Now, district officials plan to offer Olympia students an opportunity to learn in the studio this fall. Radio broadcast and production lessons will be incorporated into courses at Olympia, said Keith Imon, assistant superintendent of communication and technology. In future years, Imon said district officials hope to launch broadcast courses for Greece students.

Olympia freshman Laura Benedict, who turns 15 today, said she’d like the chance to try something different in class.

“I’m good with technology,” she said. “I’d like to see if it’s what I’d want to do.”The district acquired the radio station license in the 1970, and has housed the station ever since, said Station Manager Rob Linton. Although it started as a student-run station, its role has changed over the years, he said.

WGMC operates independently from the district with an annual budget of approximately $150,000. About 90 percent of the budget is funded by regular donations from its 1,400 members. Local businesses pick up the rest of the tab, Linton said.The station — one of a handful of such jazz stations in the nation — employs four workers and relies on more than 20 volunteers to operate, he said.

Ryan Roggow, 17, of Greece interned at the station over the winter and said he learned about the intricacies of radio broadcasting and interacting with people in the professional world. He decided to stay on as a volunteer and said he hopes to pursue a career in radio sales and marketing. Ryan said he’d love to see other students blossom as he did.

Linton, 25, also found his calling after taking a broadcasting course in high school. He said he hopes that offering hands-on instruction will help other teens find an outlet to do what they love.

“There’s such a big difference between learning from a textbook and having the chance to try something out in the studio,” Linton said.

“So many students want to learn and this will give them such an edge in college.”

WGMC-FM eventually transitioned from being student run to a volunteer driven, full time jazz radio station in the 1980′s, and began raising funds to support itself, moving away from being funded by the school district. Now branded as “Jazz90.1″ the station is one of less than 10 full time public jazz radio stations in the Country, and can be heard within a 50 mile radius of Greece New York, and online worldwide at http://www.jazz901.org/. Jazz90.1 spins artists such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and more, as well as jazz from new emerging artists of today.

Jazz90.1 also appeals to underserved communities, airing such shows as the Polka Bandstand Show, the Latin Essence, the German Radio Program, Pronto Italia, Lithuanian language Dainos Aidas and the Family Faith Radio Program.

For more information, including pictures and other information about Jazz90.1′s 35th anniversary, visit http://www.jazz901.org/.

Photos From Todd Blide and WGMC Archive

[Gallery not found] ]]> http://www.jazz901.org/444/jazz901-celebrates-35th-anniversary/feed/ 0 http://www.jazz901.org/5071/jazz90-1-featured-on-ynn/ http://www.jazz901.org/5071/jazz90-1-featured-on-ynn/#comments Sun, 23 Jan 2011 21:59:08 +0000 rob http://www.jazz901.org/?p=5071 By: Anne Lithiluxa – January 23, 2011 – In the month of February America celebrates Black History Month. In honor of that a local radio station will showcase African-American musicians who have helped shaped the jazz world as we know it today. For more than a decade Jazz 90.1 has been honoring the greats, the legends who have paved the way for new up and coming musicians. Starting February 1st, the station will highlight a different black artist four times a day, looking at how he or she has contributed to the growth of jazz music. They won’t feature only pioneers but also new artists.”Esperanza Spalding is one of them, Branford Marsalis,” said station manager Rob Linton. “So it is not just musicians who passed away but musicians who continue to shape jazz as we know it today.” Jazz 90.1 says it’s one of only eight jazz stations in the country that plays jazz music 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.