Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

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.

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.

About a week ago I mailed a letter to a lot of KUSP members whose subscriptions are coming up for renewal. In the letter I reported that KUSP’s program stream would be accessible in the public radio directory on iTunes. When I put this in the letter, I was relying on an e-mail we got from Apple on January 6 that said:

Would love to add your station, you should have received an email with all the info we require, which you partly provided. If you can send the full details we can get you added.

And then, after we sent them a bunch of technical info, they wrote back on January 15 and said:

Update will be live in 24 hours.

That coincided with when I finished the letter and we sent it off to be printed. But, as fortune would have it, Apple still hasn’t plugged us into the directory.

Guess I should have known better, and if you’ve been hunting around unsuccessfully for KUSP in their public radio directory, I apologize.