Michael Bourne, Jazz Jock Who Still Picked the Records He Played
Almost everyone who ever aspired to become a radio music host at some early point heard this warning: Do not, repeat do not, think that this job means you will ever be playing your own record collection on the air.
The way radio has worked, for many years, is that on-air hosts play the music their station or their station’s computer tells them to play. Their job is to enthusiastically promote that music, even if that music is Taylor Swift when they personally prefer John Coltrane, Marvin Gaye or Bad Bunny.
Except no rule is absolute, and there are still little slots in radio for a host like Michael Bourne, who was heard on WBGO in Newark, N.J., for 37 years before the aftereffects of a stroke forced him to sign off in January. He died Aug. 25, age 75.
The New York deejay landscape, like the landscape in every other city that has a radio station, is packed with hosts who have played album rock, country music, top-40 and smooth jazz with equal on-air enthusiasm. Or played heavy metal in one gig and classical music in the next.
It’s what professional announcers do, with only the occasional public admission of wistful thinking. The late Dan Daniel, a splendid New York deejay who played top-40, country and oldies for decades, said when he was about to retire that he only had one unfulfilled radio wish: “I’d like one shift on [the more free-formatted] WFUV, just three hours, when I could play the records I play at home. I think it would tell fans who have been listening to me all these years something about who I really am.”
Michael Bourne wouldn’t have needed that one-shot shift. For 37 years his listeners got that information regularly with his WBGO shows, notably “Singers Unlimited” on Sundays.
“I still pick the records I play,” Bourne said in a 2012 interview, acknowledging that was both rare and satisfying.
Bourne came to radio through his love of music. As a graduate student in 1972 at Indiana University, where he had just finished his PhD thesis, he was asked if he would fill in on the campus radio station, WFIU, for four weeks. A big lure was that even though the station’s format was primarily classical, Bourne would be allowed to intersperse some of the music he liked, including Irish, blues, pop, Broadway and his first love, jazz.
He had been a theater major hoping for a career as an actor. He was not the first actor for whom that didn’t happen, so he began cobbling together other things he loved, like writing. It also turned out that radio satisfied some of his performance urges, and he was impressive enough that WFIU kept him until 1984. That’s when he got a call from an old IU theater chum, fellow named Kevin Kline, who had found a bit more success in the acting game.
Kline said he had to leave for several months on a film shoot, so would Bourne be interested in taking over his New York apartment for the duration?
The same day, by cosmic coincidence, Bourne got a call from Wylie Rollins, program director at WBGO, asking if he’d like some fill-in work there.
Yes, sir. On New Year’s Eve 1984, Bourne took his first shift, filling in for Rhonda Hamilton. He didn’t leave until early 2022.
While Bourne played primarily jazz on WBGO, he also hosted “Blues Break” for several years. His signature, though, was “Singers Unlimited,” which he hosted for his whole 37-year run. “Singers Unlimited” could broadly be described as a Golden Age popular standards showcase, and as the years went by and popular standards disappeared on broadcast radio, it increasingly became an oasis for fans of that style.
“People who say this music is dead, like people who say jazz is dead, are wrong,” Bourne said in 2012. “I’m still playing bands from the 1920s. I’m still playing Ella and Irving Berlin. And how do you beat Gershwin?”
Like other hosts who still played Sinatra and Billie Holiday, Bourne talked about the music, explaining why he liked a particular song or what went into the performance. This too has become a vestigial art in much of radio, where the mantra in recent years has become “talk less and play more.”
Bourne didn’t buy that. He wouldn’t talk for 20 minutes about a Louis Armstrong solo, like the late Phil Schaap, but he felt conversation about the music was a critical link between host and listener.
“People connect to the music through the deejay,” he said. “WBGO listeners know that our hosts have been playing this music for decades. That’s time we’ve spent together. What I’m doing is really a continuity, and it’s a powerful relationship.”
None of this translated to personal wealth, WBGO being a public radio station and all, so Bourne assembled a unique career that touched on all of his interests, which ranged from exotic foods he encountered on his world travels to the St. Louis Cardinals.
He was a senior writer at DownBeat magazine, one of several publications for which he also served as theater critic. He wrote for Hennessy’s Jazz Notes and Corsage, a publication about his favorite mystery author, Rex Stout. He hosted WBGO’s annual coast-to-coast New Year’s Eve jazz show and countless WBGO travel trips to Europe and elsewhere. He became such a fixture at the Montreal summer jazz festival, which he covered for DownBeat, that on his 20th anniversary the press room was named after him. He hosted “Lyrics and Lyricists” at New York’s 92nd Street Y and jazz festivals from Amsterdam to Bombay.
He hosted shows on Sirius satellite radio, wrote liner notes for countless jazz albums, resumed his acting career with some playful skits at the Mohonk jazz festival in the Hudson Valley and was director and co-writer of Singing Astaire, a tribute that played at New York’s Birdland.
Asked when he turned 65 whether he saw himself retiring, he said, “Retire from what? I get paid to play records and go to the theater.”
Bourne probably can’t take full credit for the Cardinals winning five World Series championships during his lifetime (1964, 1967, 1982, 2006, 2011). He can take credit for improv-ing as rich a professional career as we all hope for. Along the way, he also made radio a little better.
