Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

We’re in the home stretch of KUSP’s broadcast of the 55th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival. It’s KUSP’s 32nd year as MJF’s local broadcast partner, and the third year where we’ve collaborated with the festival on Internet-delivered content.

The big change this year, thanks to the festival and their sponsors, is our live video feed every night from the Night Club. We’ve seen some terrific performances the past two nights, and we’re looking forward to tonight’s Hammond B3 Blowout.

We’ve been mentioning the funding situation for the MJF broadcast on the air this weekend, and I think some of what we’ve said bears repeating here.

For most of the time our summer music festivals have been on the air (MJF, and the Carmel Bach Festival and Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music) they’ve been paid for through a mix of KUSP funding sources. The biggest piece (typically over 90% of the festival production budget) has been made up of grants from non-profit foundations that support the arts in Monterey and Santa Cruz County. The specific sources have rotated around over time, but the foundation sector has been the go-to place for our broadcast funding. Most of these foundations also directly support the presenting organizations, and their support for our broadcasts sort of leverages the investment they make in the music festivals themselves.

In 2012, we experienced an unprecedented reduction in our foundation support. There are many reasons for this, most of which revolve around the shifting priorities of the foundation sector. The pressure on foundations to respond to cuts in government funding is immense and affects many different economic sectors.

In any event, at the start of this summer we were faced with a decision about what to do about our summer festival broadcasts, absent the foundation support that had been so important for so long. Having already committed to our Carmel Bach Festival season (the first of the three festivals each summer), our Board of Directors and our fund-raising leadership (staff and volunteer) determined to go out and raise the “missing” foundation money from our listener-contributors and our local business community. The original budget for the 2012 festival season was $35,000.

We reached our goal for the Cabrillo Festival by the end of July and then turned our attention to MJF. Going in to the start of the broadcast, we still had about $3,400 left to go to make our budget. We’ve invited our listeners to contribute at kusp.org in between the sets this weekend.

We are grateful to all the people who have made a gift so far to our music festival fund, and to our sponsor for the Monterey Jazz Festival broadcast, Nordic Naturals. But as you can see, with $3,400 or so left to raise, there’s room for you too!

After we get home from the jazz festival, we immediately turn our attention to the KUSP Fall Pledge Drive, the proceeds of which supports everything you hear on KUSP and experience at kusp.org. The goal for the pledge drive will be quite a bit higher than the campaign to save the summer music festivals, of course, and the stakes will be even bigger. It’s a critical time for public broadcasting in America, and this drive is our one best chance to not only fund the programming you’ve come to rely on, but to prepare ourselves as a station for what may lie ahead down the road.

As always, we welcome your support, and your comments.

Last weekend (beginning Friday night 9/10) KUSP experienced a long interruption in our live audio stream services on the Internet. The signal was ultimately restored on Sunday morning 9/12. The problem was ultimately traced to one of the servers at our primary Internet service provider, Cruzio. We’re assured that changes to that server have now been implemented that will ensure this specific problem won’t happen again.

We appreciate hearing from our Internet listeners whenever you experience a persistent problem. Internet audio delivery is still not as reliable as old-fashioned FM, and sometimes glitches in the system aren’t immediately apparent to us here at the studio.

Final streaming note: this weekend we will present live radio broadcasts of the 53rd annual Monterey Jazz Festival — KUSP’s 30th consecutive year of live broadcasting from MJF. Alas, the Monterey Jazz Festival is the only KUSP program all year for which we do not have Internet stream music rights, so during the hours the live broadcast is on the air, we will insert encore broadcasts of recent KUSP jazz programs on our audio streams.

We would love to bring all our listeners the sounds of the Monterey Jazz Festival, wherever it is you listen, but the Festival management remains steadfast in maintaining strict control over MJF on the Internet. Visitors to kusp.org and to our Facebook page will get ongoing reports from Monterey as the weekend unfolds — consisting of content we create, as opposed to the live musical performances from the MJF stages.

Today was a good day for award announcements connected in some way to KUSP.

First, a huge thank you to the readers of the Santa Cruz Weekly for voting KUSP the Gold Award Winner for Best Radio Station in the paper’s 2010 “Best of Santa Cruz” poll!

Not only that, Larry Blood received a third place Gold Award for “Best Radio Personality!” Larry’s achievements in his KUSP career are vast – since 1983, host of Out Front, OutBack on Tuesday nights; Producer, Announcer, and Ringleader for KUSP’s annual broadcast of the Monterey Jazz Festival; and Recording Engineer for most of the Santa Cruz area concerts heard on KUSP On-Site! He’s a friend and a great teacher, and very much honored by this recognition.

This morning, the 2010 Peabody Awards were announced by their sponsor, the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Three of the Peabodys have a KUSP connection. npr.org received its first Peabody as public radio’s “topically boundless web counterpart” (quoting the Peabody Board), Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR’s Afghanistan Bureau chief, won for her brilliant work covering both the military conflict and the deeper context of life there today; and Diane Rehm received a Peabody for her daily NPR program, which “epitomizes vigorous, courteous political discourse.”

Congratulations to all the winners, and to all KUSP contributing members who make these radio and web services possible!

KUSP’s summer music festival broadcasts are a vibrant part of our station’s heritage. For some thirty years we’ve brought some of the finest live music performed in the Monterey Bay region to radio listeners, and in recent years, to a worldwide Internet audience.

Right now three of our festival series are underway. The 2009 broadcasts of the Carmel Bach Festival started on KUSP in July and continue through September 11. Last night KUSP presented the opening night performance of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, “Azul.” The Cabrillo Festival runs through August 16. KUSP will broadcast the upcoming Cabrillo performances on tape delay starting August 18.

The third festival underway right now is new to KUSP and new in that it’s only on kusp.org (we have no radio broadcast rights) — George Wein’s Jazz Festival 55, live from Newport, Rhode Island. We’re offering the live webcast of selected performers thanks to WBGO, WGBH and NPR Music. To hear Newport, just go to our home page and follow the “Jazz at Newport” link.

Note that the audio on the Newport stream is sometimes there, and sometimes not. WBGO wasn’t able to get streaming rights to all the Newport performances, and apparently they’re just stopping the web stream in between. This is a familiar situation for us at KUSP when it comes to jazz festivals — Larry Blood, our producer, works hard all summer long to line up our Monterey Jazz Festival broadcast, and while we try, we don’t always get broadcast rights for all the performers in the festival’s main stage line-up.

Speaking of Monterey, the 52nd Annual Monterey Jazz Festival comes your way on KUSP as the capstone to our 2009 summer season — September 18, 19, and 20. As in past years, we have no Internet streaming rights to MJF, but we’ll be there in full force on the radio, so tune in!

The full KUSP summer music festival schedule is linked here. There’s a link off the home page at kusp.org too.