Those who have awakened in a cold sweat from the classic nightmare of being caught in front of a crowd, only to realize that they’re completely nude, may have come close to the fear that music director/disc jockey Eric Cohen of jazz station WAER-FM 88.3 experienced during the 2006 Jazz in the Square festival.
Tasked with emceeing the annual music blowout in Clinton Square, Cohen had hatched a plot to propose, on stage, to Deanna Lynn prior to Joshua Redman’s performance on July 30. “I had kind of tipped people off on the air in the weeks leading up that I was going to have an announcement to make at Jazz in the Square,” Cohen explains. “But what I had led a lot of people, including my girlfriend, to believe was that it was time for me to leave Syracuse and I had gotten a new job.”
In fact, the deejay had arrived at the festival around noon, then spent the day pacing backstage, rehearsing the lines with which he’d pop the question. Pending some last-minute advice from a longtime festival attendee, state Sen. John DeFrancisco (for whom Lynn worked), as well as the proper positioning of New Times photographer Mike Davis to capture the moment, Cohen was about to put himself on the spot in a big way in front of a crowd of 6,000 people.
“I turned to her and said, ‘Well, hon, you know this is a big change in my life coming up and unfortunately I can’t really say you’re going to be my girlfriend anymore,’” Cohen recalls. “For that split second there was a lot of confusion in the crowd, like ‘Is he breaking up with her right here, on stage?’ I said, ‘ I can’t call you my girlfriend, but I’d like to call you something else, and that’s my fiancee.’ I could literally hear from the stage maybe 10 to 15 women who were screaming, ‘Get down on one knee!’”
For a somewhat shy jazz deejay put in the pivotal spot of announcing acts at one of the biggest jazz festivals in Central New York, Cohen waited coolly in the crux of a tenuous predicament that could have been an ultimate embarrassment. “She didn’t actually say ‘Yes.’ All she said was ‘It would be my honor,’ so I took that as a ‘Yes,’ and then at that moment, obviously, I gave her a little kiss, and it sort of felt like we had just finished a Broadway production, so I held her hand and we took a bow. Then I was like ‘On with the show!’”
That over-the-top “Phew!” moment was an appropriate climax in Cohen’s life. Having worked at WAER since 1990, Cohen, 37, a Liverpool resident, has since married Deanna, and the two enjoy a happy life that includes his hands-on passion for spinning jazz platters that matter and keeping the cats in the loop as to what’s hip during his 1 to 4 p.m. weekday shift.
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Cohen grew up in Queens as the only child of Ray, a jazz pianist, and Vicki, an elementary school teacher. Ray Cohen, who found success in the often-tumultuous music industry, nurtured his son’s musical interests during his teen years, while at the same time the two shared a passion for sports. As a result, Cohen headed to Syracuse University in 1989 to study speech communication from the College of Visual and Performing Arts; his goal was sports announcing.
Shortly after graduating in 1993, Cohen began leaning toward his musical background. After volunteering at WAER while at SU, Cohen soon landed a gig as a permanent member of the staff at the public radio station.
Given that non-profit, public radio stations like WAER are funded by contributions from listeners, in addition to federal funding and the assistance it receives from SU (a model dramatically opposed to commercial radio stations, where funding comes from advertising sales), you’ll often hear Cohen’s on-air appeals to local jazz fans during annual fund-raisers. Cohen has also hosted the weekly series B3 Bonanza since the summer of 1996; the program, featuring jazz tunes performed exclusively by those who play the celebrated Hammond B3 organ, airs Fridays from 3 to 4 p.m.
Perhaps Cohen’s largest role at WAER is to listen to every disc sent to the station, then deem which CDs will land among the thousands in the station’s music library. Cohen’s favorite jazz artists are great vocalists like Frank Sinatra and Diana Krall, yet some of his other musical faves may sound surprising. “I used to actually like Whitesnake back in the 1980s,” Cohen admits. “I was also a big Hall and Oates fan, and an Earth, Wind and Fire fan. But probably my favorite concert that I’ve been to was a Steely Dan show. I put them in my top five bands that I really like.”
Ron Ockert, program director at WAER, has witnessed Cohen’s development as a radio deejay since he started as a college sophomore. “I would certainly say his knowledge of jazz is a real asset to the station,” Ockert explains. “It’s a real plus that we have such an experienced guy. Eric knows music, and in particular jazz, inside and out.”
More high praise for Cohen’s occasional occupation as one of the most exposed event emcees in the area (Cohen also partly emcees the Syracuse Jazz Fest and many other events throughout the city) comes from Larry Luttinger, executive director of the Central New York Jazz Arts Foundation, which coordinates Jazz in the Square. Luttinger was present during Cohen’s anxious marriage proposal and one of the few in the audience who were in on the high jinks.
“Eric has been the voice of the CNYJAF since 1996 and he is WAER’s ambassador to live jazz in Central New York,” Luttinger explains. “He is the perfect emcee for every jazz occasion, because not only does he know every artist biographically and usually personally as well, but after a short pre-concert meeting he’ll go out and do five perfect minutes for any jazz event, concert, clinic, festival, cabaret, you name it. He knows the subject matter, plain and simple.”
Cohen and WAER are busy preparing for local festivities to celebrate April, dubbed as Jazz Appreciation Month by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Modern History since 2003. The station will host a concert with Catherine Russell, daughter of Louis Armstrong’s musical director Luis Russell and jazz vocalist in her own right, at Eastwood’s Palace Theatre, 2384 James St., on Saturday, April 18, 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 and are available by advance sale only. For information, call 443-4834.
Given his satisfaction with his role at WAER, Cohen says he’s likely to remain the voice of Syracuse jazz for years to come. “I’ve met a lot of friendly people in this community,” Cohen says. “Working in the college environment of WAER I can still get nostalgic about my SU days, even though those days have come and gone. I still like working with and training students, and teaching them the ins and outs of radio.”
Q: Can you explain what was it like growing up with a jazz pianist for a father?
A: He got his start back in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was still working up in the Catskill Mountains. That’s actually where he met my mom.
He didn’t really do a lot of recording. The only recording that he did was with a guy from England named Derek Smith who played the harpsichord. What they would do is they would kind of play across from each other, and they called themselves Derek and Ray. They appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. So my dad had a little taste of fame.
But his big break came when he eventually hooked up with Frank Sinatra. He was Sinatra’s pianist for about three or four years in the mid-to-late 1970s. It was really past Sinatra’s prime, but still {my dad} got to tour. In fact, he played a show here in Syracuse for Sinatra at the Onondaga County War Memorial.
Q: How much did your dad contribute to your musical education?
A: I’d hear him practicing in the house and I’d hear him mention all these jazz names, and they just kind of caught my ear. He’d have these things called Fake Books, which were these gigantic books of all these old songs, and so occasionally he would just take me downstairs to the piano and play me a lot of these songs, and that’s how I got familiar with a lot of these great American songbook tunes that I play on the air today from different orchestras.
He never pressured me to follow in his footsteps, but I kind of felt obligated to learn an instrument. The first instrument I ever learned was a violin, but my affection with that ended probably by junior high school. Pretty much all through high school I took piano lessons, but not from my dad. He was working a lot, doing a lot of society parties in and around New York and different hotels, and he didn’t have the time to be a piano teacher.
The father of a kid who I went to high school with taught me piano. He was a Broadway musician {Dennis Elliott}. To this day I can still play. I can read music, and I can probably play a little tune here and there, but once I got out of high school and came to Syracuse I knew that I wasn’t going to really take it seriously enough to become a professional player like him. But I knew that I had acquired enough knowledge of jazz and of the history of jazz that I could take it in another direction, and that’s how I came to be a music director.
Q: Did you attend jazz concerts while you were in New York?
A: No. I didn’t get to go to a lot of jazz shows until I got to college. Growing up, I didn’t get to make it into New York City a lot, but as I got older and appreciated the music more I’ve had a chance to be at Birdland, the Blue Note Jazz Club, the Village Vanguard and other spots.
I got to see {jazz piano legend} Oscar Peterson with my dad at Birdland. We were just there watching Oscar and his trio, and I knew that for my dad Oscar Peterson was one of his all-time favorites. This was maybe two to three years before Oscar passed away, and so my dad knew this would probably be one of the last times he would see him.
Being in Birdland, knowing the history of that club, being there sitting next to my dad and then seeing Oscar: When the show was over, I turned to my dad and they were applauding and I could see he had tears in his eyes, because it was quite a moment for him, and it was a moment for me, too.
Q: What factored into your decision to attend Syracuse University?
A: I came here knowing the history of Syracuse and sports announcers, so that’s what led me to WAER. I had some great experiences doing sports. The guy who used to be the afternoon announcer before me, a guy named Rich Sheehe, and I became friends, and he asked if I would maybe want to do some music announcing at the radio station. He trained me, and I said, “Well, it’s a change of pace.”
So I started doing some evening shifts {in 1992}, and eventually I graduated from college and I hadn’t really pursued getting a sports job, but I was really getting more and more into music. Generally, I just did a lot of volunteer work at the radio station as a music announcer, and then Rich left {also in 1992} and I took over his role as the afternoon announcer, which eventually led to me being named as music director.
Q: Do you ever regret not going into sports announcing?
A: I’ve done {music} now for the last 15 years, and there are times when I do have some regrets when I watch a game on TV, thinking, “Man, I would love to do sports.”
I come out of retirement every once in a while. I did some baseball games and I did an SU basketball game this year over the winter break and I just fell right back into it. I did enough games when I was in school that I have a passion for sports. Give me a headset, and I think I can handle myself. I know what I’m talking about.
Q: Was your dad a big sports fan as well?
A: Oh, yeah. Those are our two common bonds: music and sports. I mean, we’re both big Mets fans. When he and I are not talking music we’re talking sports. His passion for sports was carried over to me.
Q: Have you ever considered leaving Syracuse to pursue radio in a different market?
A: A couple times I’ve kind of hit that wall, especially when people say, “Eric, you know you’re good. You should be in a bigger market than Syracuse. You’ve got the voice to do commercial radio, not public radio.”
One of my biggest problems in the beginning was trying to tone my voice down for public radio. You can’t be like {a morning announcer} or even like John Smith {Morning Edition host and news producer}, who I work with. John used to do the Friday-night show in the 1980s, and now he’s working for us. John’s got an unbelievable voice, and it was a pretty big adjustment for him because you have to tailor your delivery to public radio as opposed to doing a Friday-night music show. So that was an adjustment for me to make,
I’ve always given {the idea of going to another market} serious thought, although I’ve never really pursued it as hard as I would have liked. Part of my problem is that—and I’ve said this over the years—when you’ve been doing the afternoon show for 15 years, it is so easy to fall into that comfort zone. It’s like the Cheers line: Everybody knows your name. Everybody knows your voice, and when you’ve emceed as many events as I have there is that certain level of celebrity where, because you work on the radio and because you’re out and about doing stuff, people know you.
Q: How has the station changed during the time you’ve worked there?
A: I guess the obvious answer to what has changed is all the different media outlets out there. When I started at WAER and evolved to announcer in 1993, that was pre-Internet. There wasn’t YouTube. There weren’t iPods.
We were using carts {a cassette-like recording format historically used in radio} up until about maybe three years ago. The carts were just the underwriters’ spots. We’re still kind of a little bit behind the times in that on most stations nowadays you play a song and it’s just pushing a button and the song is there. When you hear one of our spots, like, “Support for WAER comes from the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que,” that’s all loaded digitally on the computer. But every song I play is coming straight from a disc and putting it into a CD player.
Eventually we’re going to probably have to go the route of a lot of stations, and that’s to build up a database where we drop in a couple of thousand songs into a computer. So if an announcer gets a request for songs, like, “Can you play a Sonny Rollins tune?,” now what they do is just scour the stacks for the Sonny Rollins CD that we have, where if it were on a computer you could probably access it a little quicker. I’m actually looking forward to the day when we finally go totally digital.
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Q: Do you feel like the radio station is now competing with other formats of listening to music?
A: I guess that’s the biggest change. We have to compete now with so many other ways that people are getting their music: iTunes, YouTube and hearing stuff on a MySpace page. The Internet is probably the greatest innovation of the last 20 or 30 years, but it definitely has hurt radio in many ways, you know?
Artists are counting on us to get their music out there on the radio, so we’ve had to try to come up with different ways to do that. We have a Web page now {www.waer.org}, and we didn’t have a Web page when I first started at the station. Just having a Web page is a tremendous asset for us.
Q: Do you enjoy the freedom of being able to program the music on the station that you want to play, as opposed to at corporate media companies like Clear Channel that regulate what its stations’ deejays can play?
A: Without question. I kind of have a hands-off approach with my announcers. There was a time when I used to give them a playlist and say, “OK, you either play this, this, this and that in this order.” But I love that freedom. Now what I do each week is make a list of all the new music I put in the studio, and I will let my announcers know that they need to work in as much of the new stuff as they can.
We don’t want to be recycling all the same stuff that we’ve been playing year after year, and granted, we have thousands of CDs, so it’d be pretty hard to repeat stuff. If I played Miles Davis on my show every single day, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s so much exciting, new jazz that’s been coming out year after year. I just say there’s a certain hourly structure that they need to follow, that they have to work in some new stuff, that they have to work in three or four classic cuts and they have to work in some vocal stuff, as well. So there’s a system, but I don’t provide them with a daily playlist.
Let’s say there’s a Coltrane take on a really long solo that gets a little out there: We kind of stay away from that, especially during the daytime hours. It has to be melodic. My boss said to me a few weeks ago, “If I can’t hum it, then don’t play it.” It’s got to have some kind of a riff to it that will stay in your head when it’s over.
’Trane has done stuff that’s very melodic, but there’s also ’Trane exploring African music with Pharaoh Sanders that might not be appropriate for a midday audience, whereas it might be appropriate at night when your mind is not focusing on work. During the evening hours, from like 8 to 11 p.m., before we go to an automated system, I do let my evening announcers stretch out a little bit more. Then, at night there are people listening to us when they’re doing other stuff. Like they’re also watching TV.
Q: How did the B3 Bonanza show come together?
A: I had always enjoyed the sound of the Hammond B3. Now, my dad was a pianist, but not an organist, so I didn’t grow up listening to organ. I think it was a Jack McDuff record that I first played at the station in my very early days of being an announcer here. It might have been this song called “Rock Candy,” and it was just McDuff wailing at the organ. I was like, “Man! What about doing a whole hour of this?,” and of course I ran it by the powers that be at the station and they seemed to be cool with it. So then I thought I had to get a name for it, and the Hammond Happy Hour wasn’t going to fly. Bonanza just came to mind.
I knew I wanted to do that show at the end of the week. It actually used to be later, from 4 to 5 p.m., but then we had All Things Considered at 4 p.m., so we had to move it to 3 p.m. I wanted it to be as close to 5 p.m. as possible, so that when people heard this music, which is uplifting, get-up-off-your-chair music, they are ready for the weekend.
It started in 1996, so it’s coming on being 13 years old. It’s one hour a week, but it’s the hour I probably look forward to the most. I make sure I drop in a Jimmy Smith cut every week, but I also make sure to introduce people to B3 players that they’ve never heard before. I think the B3 itself has had a sort of renaissance of sorts, and I wanted to capitalize on that renaissance. I knew there wasn’t another show in the market that devoted an entire segment to just this one instrument.
Q: Have you dabbled much with the B3 organ yourself?
A: I’ve never actually sat down on the organ itself. It looks very complicated. It would not be my first choice of instrument to play. You’ve got different levels, and you’ve got the pedals. So I don’t play it, but I like hearing Jimmy and {Richard} “Groove” Holmes, McDuff and modern-day groups that incorporate organ like Soulive and Maceo Parker.
The B3 gained popularity in the 1960s, but I think it wasn’t until the early 1990s when, somehow or another, the B3 came back. I don’t really know who was responsible for that. But now there’s certain Web sites devoted strictly to the B3. I like to think what my show has done is educated a lot of people on the instrument, and how the instrument can sound like a church instrument in one mode, but there are so many different sounds that come out of the B3.
Q: As of now the B3 Bonanza show doesn’t have a theme song. Have you ever considered picking one?
A: I thought about it. This show has never had a theme song, and it’s never even been underwritten. It’s just an island unto itself. What became our theme when I started out was the song I closed out with every show for probably like the first year, which was “Boogie On Reggae Woman” performed by Larry Goldings.
Q: Why do you think it’s important to have a month dedicated to jazz?
A: Jazz is never going to go away, but I don’t think jazz is going to get the true mass respect that I think it deserves. When you think of the history of the music, obviously with Jazz Appreciation Month in April, we designate that month and we say, “Now, let’s recognize the Duke Ellingtons and the Ella Fitzgeralds and the John Coltranes of the world.”
It’s music that really should be appreciated more, but unfortunately you don’t see as many clubs that are as filled as they used to be. Maybe part of that’s the economy, or maybe we’re not marketing jazz the way we should.
Q: Having been both a sports announcer and a jazz announcer throughout your career, did you hang out with the mods or the jocks in high school?
A: I was a linebacker! No, I’m just kidding. I played a little basketball, but not on a team or anything.
Actually, my main sport was tennis. Most people probably don’t know about this, but I was a tennis instructor for three years. I had a tennis camp on Long Island. I love to play, and I took it seriously. I mean, I never got good enough where I thought, “Oh, man! Maybe I could make a career out of this.” But it was fun working with kids and teaching tennis. I figured, you know, I’d be best served being on the microphone as opposed to being on the field.
Decent proposal: Eric Cohen asks Deanna Lynn to marry him, a highlight of Jazz in the Square 2005.
Hi, hi, high: WAER’s high-definition broadcast comes from this shiny rack unit in the studio.
