Chamber Music Blues

"It cuts you to pieces," said a man.

"I'm in pieces," said a lady, falling over a chair.

It was about 2 a.m. in the Palm Room at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria. For four hours various jazz musicians, drifting in from the hotspots, had been showing a roomful of bigwig musicians and assorted guests that jazz is serious. At the moment a hot guitarist, academically introduced as a "demonstrator of social and protest blues," was beginning to take effect on listeners like Conductor Wilfred Pelletier of the Metropolitan Opera. Soon Benny Goodman arrived, said "Hi" to the assembled thinkers and blew into his clarinet. In the early dawn he was still going strong. So were Mouth-Organist Larry Adler, Pianist Alec Templeton, and the dogged panel of classicists. By that time the classicists more or less agreed: it would be all right for Manhattan's Station WQXR to broadcast blues.

Only commercial station in the country that devotes 80% of its broadcasting day to classical music, WQXR needed some such catalyst as a mad night" at the Waldorf before it could go the whole way in recognizing jazz.

The man who engineered the party was WQXR's shrewd musical director, Eddy Brown. A chubby cigar-smoker with bright eyes, he has worked around to hot music slowly. Ten years ago he founded the Chamber Music Society, which first got chamber music on the air. Lately he has been doing a series of programs on American composers, and WQXR has broadcast "salon swing." For the serious plunge into jazz (tentative date: January) he plans a single program series in which he will use recordings of classic and modern jazz

(Dixieland, blues, etc.), let visiting swing and concert musicologists fight it out over their merits.

Fortnight ago WQXR's power was stepped up to 10,000 watts--the second boost within a year. Behind each increase is the desire of WQXR's founder and president, smallish, paunchy, deep-voiced John Vincent Lawless Hogan, to broadcast good music with maximum accuracy.

Operating on the belief that there are enough intelligent people in New York City and environs to support a station that shuns soap opera, funnymen and corny commercials, WQXR has whooped up its earnings from $9,174 in 1936 (when the station graduated from experimental ranks) to $177,074 in 1940. Just for the hell of it, Mr. Hogan augmented WQXR's income in 1939 with $20,000 picked up by selling Hogan-devised sets to WQXR listeners. He was an associate of Radio Inventor Lee de Forest.

WQXR's success has been due not only to smart Technician Hogan, but to its equally smart general manager--Elliott Sanger. The station started out with a collection of four or five records, which were played over & over again. Today it has a collection of 10,000 and an orchestra of its own. Its programs attract about 6,000 letters a week.

In order to follow the programs of WQXR some 14,000 listeners every month contribute 10-c- to obtain a monthly program listing. Stern in its policy about advertising, WQXR rejects obnoxious commercial plugs on the ground that they insult fastidious customers. It was mortified when it learned too late for cancellation that a Ford show last year included advertising ditties.

President Hogan hopes to do likewise with his FM station W2XQR. Another important sideline with him is a wireless facsimile system he thought up in 1933. It is being used now by the Canadian Signal Corps.

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