JAZZ DISC JOCKEY PHIL BAILEY

For Phil Bailey jazz music is a hobby, a job, a lifelong love

On weekday afternoons in Louisville when the radio airwaves are filled with the sounds of Bruce Springsteen and Madonna, WFPL disc jockey Phil Bailey is busy playing records by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.

Bailey is the host of the station’s “Jazz Today” program and also musical director of WFPK, WFPL’s sister station. The work is perfect for the Maine native, who has loved music - and jazz in particular - since the early 1950s.

“When I was growing up, I was a baseball fan; and I used to listen to the Red Sox play on WHDH in Boston. Then I got into the habit of listening to the music they played on the station after the game was over,” Bailey said.

Bailey explained that during the early ‘50s, commercial radio stations were still playing a lot of big band music by band leaders such as Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman.

“I loved to listen to this music, but I didn’t realize that even back then it was already 10 or 15 years old,” he said.

Then in 1960, when Bailey enlisted in the Navy, a fellow seaman turned him on to modern jazz. “This guy was a bebop fanatic; and when I asked him what kind of records to buy, he’d always recommend albums by jazz artists,” Bailey said.

When Bailey came to Louisville in 1965 he was a jazz addict. “I was looking for a job in radio then. I finally found a disc jockey position, but it was for a station in Madison, Ind,” he said.

Working and living in Madison didn’t stop Bailey from getting involved in the jazz scene in Louisville. He hosted one of the city’s early jazz programs on WHAS radio in the mid 1960s and was a charter member of the original Louisville Jazz Council, founded in 1966. That same year, Bailey, who is also a pianist, trumpeter and bassist, joined the local musician’s union.
In Spite of his busy schedule, Bailey found time for another on of his interests, tape recording.

“I got to record many great jazz musicians in Louisville during the late 1960s when they appeared here in concert. People like trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Clark Terry. And saxophonist Phil Woods,” he said.

During the 1970s Bailey spent most of his time outside of Louisville, as a pop-music disc jockey for radio stations in Lexington and Bowling Green, Ky.

“Between the time my jazz show died on WHAS in 1967 and (the time) I started working for a public radio station in Bowling Green in 1980, I got to play very little jazz on the radio,” he said.

In Bowling Green, Bailey got a chance to study classical music. “I was working as a disc jockey at night, and I wanted to find something to do during the day, so I started taking music courses at Western Kentucky University ,” he said.

Bailey’s daytime music courses led to a master’s degree in music from Western. And when he came back to Louisville in the fall of 1982, he was hired as music director for the Louisville Free Public Library’s FM classical music station WFPK.

“At that time I was also hired as music director for WFPK’s sister station WFPL-FM; but Gerry Weston, who was then hosting the “Jazz Tonight” show was doing such a good job (that) I let him handle most of the music.” (Weston was recently promoted to station manager of WFPL.)

Bailey said there is no conflict of interest in his promotion of both classical music and jazz.

“I look at it this way. Classical music is a foreign language I’ve learned to speak well, but jazz is my native tongue. When I first got interested in jazz, people were more narrow minded. If you were a classical music fan, you had to be against jazz, and vice versa.


“But classical musicians have always been jazz fans, and jazz musicians have always appreciated classical music. That attitude is finally being accepted by the public. Today on WFPK-FM we air some shows that feature work by the Kronos Quartet. That’s a classical string quartet that plays all kinds of 20th century music, from Jimi Hendrix and Thelonious Monk to Shostakovich,” he said.

Meanwhile, Bailey’s “Jazz Today” show, which airs Monday through Friday from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., continues to spread the word of jazz throughout the city. The show regularly features interviews with local and national jazz musicians; and Bailey spends a lot of time informing his listeners about the music he plays.

“I think of a radio show as a kind of symphony, with the records being movements of a symphony, and my patter and commercials as transitions between those movements.”

By Danny O’Bryan
“Around Downtown., The Courier Journal, 1/6/86

From the up-coming book “Derby City Jazz.”