WRVR’s Legendary Ed Beach: Alive, Well . . . and Ready for the Airwaves

— Will Layman

Published in "Radio and Records," April 2003

“Just Jazz — Ed Beach with you.”

Those words promised great music to fans of New York’s legendary WRVR. They were crooned, from 1961 to 1973, in a resonant baritone over the swinging line of Wes Montgomery’s “So Do It,” by a trained Shakespearean actor and journeyman jazz pianist — and by the finest educator and disk jockey in the history of jazz.

Today, over 2,000 hours of what The New York Times called “the most notable nonplaying contribution jazz has witnessed in New York” are not only being preserved at the Library of Congress but also are again available for broadcast. Ed Beach, who turned 80 this January and lives in Eugene, Oregon, hopes the tapes that are his legacy will survive and find a new audience. Many highly influential members of the jazz community agree that Beach’s contributions to broadcasting and to jazz should not be forgotten.

Innovative Broadcasting

“Ed Beach set a precedent for intelligent jazz broadcasting that has yet to be equaled,” according to Gary Giddins, jazz biographer and Village Voice writer. Giddins speaks from personal experience. He recalls first hearing “Just Jazz” on his car radio while driving to and from work. “Ed Beach was absolutely an inspiration,” Giddins states.

“Just Jazz” was a revolutionary radio program. Each two-hour show featured a single artist — and often focused on a narrow period in the career of a prolific artist like Duke Ellington. While Symphony Sid and even Mort Fega broadcast “personality shows,” Beach put the music first and used his dry wit to bring in new listeners. “Ed told you what you wanted to know, but he let the music speak for itself,” explains Giddins. “He told you who the musicians were, he gave you the recording dates, he never blathered, and you never felt it was about him.”

Phil Schaap, archivist at Jazz at Lincoln Center and broadcaster on New York’s WKCR, started listening to Beach as a kid in 1963. Schaap explains the “Just Jazz” approach this way: “This is a guy who had enough stage presence to bring off discography as the language of a radio program. Ed Beach is the greatest.”

Creating a Generation of Jazz Fans

A list of Beach’s devoted fans reads like a Who’s Who of jazz elite. In addition to Giddins and Schaap, the Ed Beach Fan Club includes figures as disparate as the Head of the Music Division of the Library of Congress Jon Newsom, classical and jazz expert Gunther Schuller, jazz historian Lewis Porter, as well as jazz pianist Hank Jones, saxophonist Illinois Jacquet and drummer Danny Gottleib. Newsom’s assessment of Beach’s impact is definitive: “Ed Beach created a generation of people who are today keeping jazz alive.” Danny Gottleib, an original member of the Pat Metheny Band, was hipped to Beach by his high school band teacher in New Jersey. “I lived for that show. It was a very meticulous approach to the music but done in a very compelling, entertaining style. He had a very beboppy, erudite kind of voice, almost like the great Yankee Stadium announcer Bob Shepard.” The New York Times wrote that Ed’s voice “suggests Louis Armstrong as a Harvard man.”

Jon Newsom was also a teenage Beach fan. So when the jazz historian, composer, conductor and Beach fanatic Gunther Schuller tipped him to the well-preserved “Just Jazz” tapes, Newsom contacted Beach and acquired them for the Library of Congress in 1992. Today, tapes of his best programs from 1965 through 1973 — over a thousand shows covering jazz history from Blind Lemon Jefferson and Scott Joplin through George Benson and the Jazz Crusaders and everything in between — are carefully preserved and seeking a new audience. “There are so many rooms in the house of jazz,” Beach recalls today. “I loved the variety and energy of it.” After his morning broadcast, Beach would spend the whole day in an office at the back of the WRVR studios, auditioning, timing and choosing tracks for the next day’s show from both the WRVR collection and his personal library of 8,000 jazz albums.

Jay Kernis, today the Senior Vice President of Programming for National Public Radio, was a summer intern at WRVR for five summers from 1969 to 1973. He vividly recalls Beach as “tall, theatrical in his precise, deep speech and revered by all.” Robert Seigel, host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” was also at WRVR during that time and recalls that Beach “loved and knew jazz with encyclopedic authority.”

WRVR’s Demise

By 1973, however, WRVR went commercial. Although — largely on the basis of the success engendered by “Just Jazz with Ed Beach” — it played jazz all day, it also began using play-lists. Beach’s meticulously researched shows gave way to more mundane fare, and “Just Jazz” was no longer taped. Beach left WRVR when the station was sold at the end of 1976. On September 8, 1980 at noon — after being acquired by Viacom International — WRVR went from playing Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” to Waylon Jennings. It had become a country station.

Folks who heard Beach will never forget him. Lewis Porter, a leading jazz scholar and author at Rutgers University, recalls: “I listened every day after school for hours and took notes.” Danny Gottleib remembers “specific shows that changed my life — the Maynard Ferguson show, the Oscar Pettiford show.”

But Gary Giddins worries that “Beach is already forgotten. There is no awareness of him any more.” Phil Schaap may be even more pessimistic. “Not only do people not remember Ed Beach — they don’t remember Duke Ellington.” As recently as 1998, Schaap interviewed Beach on WKCR for Louis Armstrong’s birthday, but otherwise Beach has no interest in returning to the airwaves in real time.

Tapes Available

The “Just Jazz” tapes may be another story. Van Jay, who worked with Beach at WRVR and is currently a jazz and gospel programming consultant and producer, is working to have the show rebroadcast. “My goal is to get the music, and Ed’s brilliant commentary, back out there where people can hear it.” To date, Van Jay has submitted the idea to WBGO-FM in Newark, NJ (a jazz and NPR public station) and directly to Jay Kernis in NPR’s programming department. Neither has responded.

Jon Newsom explains that the Library of Congress vision is to have “the entire Ed Beach Collection put on our web site — accessible to everybody at all times. If you’re wondering what went on with Charlie Parker in 1946 you could hear Ed’s entire program on Bird.” That, however, would require an individual clearance from the owner of the copyright to every recorded song on the “Just Jazz” tapes.

“However,” Newsom adds, “rebroadcasting the tapes on public radio will not require the broadcaster to go back to the owners of the copyright. Anyone who wants the tapes — including public radio — can have them for the price of a copy.” Both Newsom and Van Jay want to have the whole archive converted to a digital format. To date, the Library has converted only about ten percent of the archive, though Newsom reports that the condition of the originals is “pretty good, as they were made during an era of ‘sticky tape’ that does not deteriorate quickly.”

“Legacy of the Highest Magnitude”

Beach himself is also in good shape. He listens to jazz every day and is still enthralled by the power of the Basie band, the melodic invention of Sidney Bechet, the harmonies of Bill Evans. And he still gets out to hear music — in the last few months he caught the Dave Holland Quintet and was knocked out by trombonist Robin Eubanks.

Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Beach remembers hearing Ellington and Fats Waller on the radio. “I ran out and bought those records. They thrilled me.” Soon enough, Ed learned to play piano by ear and caught gigs with local bands. Leading a Nat Cole-style trio brought him to New York, where he fell further in love with swing and bebop, catching Dizzy’s big band, Billie Holiday, Don Byas and others along 52nd Street. “New York back then was glorious,” Beach recalls.

He returned to Oregon for college and then found that his voice was a natural for the stage. Beach played Shakespeare and other works off-Broadway and in summer stock before landing his first radio gig. Phil Schaap calls Beach a champion of jazz. “His is a legacy of the highest magnitude. When no one else was doing it, Ed was keeping the music alive on the radio.”

Gary Giddins is excited about the prospect of hearing “Just Jazz” on the radio again. “I’m a very enthusiastic Ed Beach fan. I think those tapes should be played again.”

Beach, however, remains modest about his achievement. “Why did I spend so much time on ‘Just Jazz’? I did it for me. I was learning the history of jazz. And I thought — well, why shouldn’t the listeners learn too?”

But some things can’t be put into words even by a legendary jazz educator. Like, for instance, what is it that makes jazz so great? Beach hesitates and shakes his head. “It just swings, man,” he says.

And he’s right.