It all began when I was a boy growing up in Utica, New York. My mother’s cousin, Jerry, had a hammerlock on the city’s jukebox business, and every so often he’d give my mother a stack of his excess stock: 45s, albums, even some older 78s, and the music was just all over the map. When I was teenager, I built up a sizable record collection of rock and pop and folk music, and when I got to college, really got turned on to jazz and then classical music. In my 20s, I made my big jump into radio, and spent about 30 years working in various formats: album rock, adult contemporary, jazz, and classical. Once I lost my last radio gig, in 2010, I decided to get some other kind of day job, but I never could suppress the need to program music and talk about it a little.
In 2016, I began doing Kensington’s Premium Blend for community station WGRN in Columbus, Ohio. I’ve always been grateful that I can put the program together the way I want to, without having to please some program director obsessed with ratings and demographics. I go where the music takes me, and if others have ears to hear, that’s wonderful; and if they don’t, they’ll find what they really want elsewhere and I’ll never know the difference.
KPB will continue to be offered as a weekly broadcast program, but now I’m very glad to have finally gotten this webpage up and going and that my program can now be heard as a podcast through Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Stitcher, et al. I hope to attract a few listeners whose ears and sensibilities are as crazy big as mine.
Thanks for listening!