Topics for Clean Up Your Act for the week of March 19 include “Surveying coral reefs by satellite” and “The Brits tackle climate change.”

A new satellite survey has allowed scientists to pinpoint the location and assess the health of half-a-million square miles of coral reefs. Over-fishing is a problem.
With fewer fish to eat algae that grow on coral, the algae can overwhelm and kill entire reefs. Coral reefs support 9-million species of aquatic life.

Britain has become the first country to set hard and fast targets for tackling climate change. The goals are ambitious…a 26% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and a 60% reduction by 2050. Can they do it? Energy experts say to cut emissions that much by mid-century, the British would have to scrap all their domestic appliances, rip out their central heating, give up foreign hoidays and get rid of their cars!

Clean Up Your Act airs at 6:35 a.m. and 3:35 p.m. weekdays. Weekend editions are heard at 9:20 a.m. Saturday and Sunday and at 3:20 p.m. Saturdays.

George Dorman – News and Operations Director

Boy, it was a great week for live jazz in Eastern Iowa this past week. With numerous opportunities to catch bassist Ben Allison and his Quartet and David Sanborn and his Quintet, it was a rare treat for us jazz fans. I caught Allison’s date at the Sanctuary on Monday night, after he and trumpeter Ron Horton stopped by the studios on Sunday for a chat and performance (which are now on the KCCK web site). The Quartet had a great time playing for the appreciative audience on Monday, presenting a few hours of their very forward-thinking jazz. And then, on the other end of the jazz spectrum, there was Sanborn at Hancher on Wednesday night playing a scorching set of his funked-up contemporary jazz. Despite some technical problems which had the players somewhat distracted for a large portion of the evening, it was a fine set. I could have done with fewer of his trademark ballads, but that didn’t detract too much. As for live music this weekend, Saul Lubaroff gets a two-night stand at the Tuscan Moon in Kalona, while Dick Watson and Eddie Piccard do their regular gigs. You can get specifics with our concert calendar at kcck.org.

Bob Stewart, Program Director bobs@kcck.org

Bassist Ben Allison and his quartet are in the area this week for a series of live performances. It starts with a gig at the Sanctuary in Iowa City tonight, then at the Redstone Room in Davenport on Wednesday, and the Reverb in Cedar Falls on Thursday before moving on to the Blue Room in Kansas City on Friday. We’re going to have Ben in studio this afternoon at 1pm, along with trumpeter Ron Horton, for a conversation and a performance.

Bob Stewart, Program Director bobs@kcck.org

Topics for Clean Up Your Act for the week of March 5 include “Green roofs grow in popularity” and “An Oscar for Al.”

The number of green roofs in the U.S. is said to have grown by 80% in 2005.
A green roof contains a layer of soil and vegetation. It helps insulate the roof, reducing heating and cooling, retains rainfall which reduces pressure on storm seweres, and actually prolongs the life of a roof by shielding it from the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

Al Gore won an Oscar for Best Domentary at the recent Academy Awards for “An Inconvenient Truth”…a chronicle of his 30 years of research on global warming.
One of the movie’s prdocuers…Laurie David…says the movie brings global warming down to a personal level. She says if everyone does something, we can start to solve the problem.

As we noted Iowa native Glenn Miller’s birthdate yesterday, it brought back memories of my first exposure to jazz back when I was a kid. We were all bombarded by those commercials for the “Best of the Big Band Era” compilations on television. You’d get little snippets of the more famous charts of the Swing Era’s most popular bands as a list of the album’s complete roster scrolled across the screen. To this day, I could probably still recall some of those snippets, but as far as the whole charts go, my memory would be quite hazy. Unless it’s the charts of Mr. Miller who, maybe with the exception of Benny Goodman, has proven the most enduring figure of the Swing Era.

That’s because, also when I was a kid, I was exposed to that great film about Miller starring Jimmy Stewart, Henry Morgan and June Allyson. “The Glenn Miller Story” also included cameos from Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, Ben Pollack and others. The music just swept me away! Seeing just how passionate Miller was about his music was very intriguing. The mysterious and tragic circumstances of his death also sent a powerful message. I was out the door to one of my local album shops (which are sadly now obsolete) to get a disc of Miller’s music. I learned his most famous pieces from front to back, and even taped radio shows on my little cassette recorder as if I was broadcasting his concerts from some far-off ballroom. As a sign of the times, the show was usually sponsored by some cigarette brand I had seen in commercials…usually it was Chesterfield for some reason. Luckily I never picked up the nicotane habit, but I was hooked on jazz from there on out!

I’m sure our resident Miller aficianado, Cary J. Hahn, will be featuring plenty of Miller’s music on his Big Band Memories program this Sunday afternoon. A well-deserved salute to one of Iowa’s greatest native sons.

Bob Stewart, Program Director bobs@kcck.org

KCCK returned to the air this morning (Monday), several hours ahead of when we thought we’d be back up, so things are rapidly returning to normal. Kirkwood, of course, is closed today and tonight, all locations. Listen to KCCK or watch kcck.org for the early word on Kirkwood classes on Tuesday.

There are many things critical to the success of a radio station… Great music, interesting personalities…

And electricity.

Right now, KCCK has only two out of those three. The winter storm that blew through Eastern Iowa on Saturday first iced over our tower, requiring us to leave the air about 5pm, and remain off till the antenna thawed out. The knockout punch was delivered a couple hours later, when the power lines to a major substation snapped and took out power to the entire Cedar Rapids Kirkwood campus.

Because KCCK’s web page is hosted off campus (thank you ABC Solutions!), our web page is still up, although Kirkwood’s is not, as of this writing, at least. So you can check kcck.org and this blog from time to time, to check on our status.

At this time, we’re going to regroup tomorrow (Monday) and look into renting a generator to power the transmitter.

We’ll also try to post information on Kirkwood’s status as well.

Trying to contact us? Office phones and email are down, of course. You can post comments to this blog, or email us at a temporary address… 883kcck@gmail.com.

Unless you’re been held incommunicado somewhere for the last week (or perhaps haven’t caught any newscasts because you’re a satellite radio listener), you know that Sirius and XM, the holders of the U.S. licenses for satellite radio, have decided the market simply won’t sustain two sat radio companies, and they need to merge, in effect becoming a legal monopoly.

As someone who is trying to sustain a local public radio service on, oh… 1/500 of what Sirius is paying just Howard Stern, it’s hard for me to be sympathetic. Both XM and Sirius have been spending money like the U.S. government, locking up national personalities like Stern and Oprah, not to mention NFL and college sports, NASCAR and even A Prairie Home Companion and Car Talk. At the same time, they’ve been spending millions on advertising. As a terrestrial radio manager, I’ve been more than happy to let them beat each other up, and am having trouble understanding why it’s the government’s job to let them have a monopoly simply because they’ve spent themselves into oblivion.

Am I worried satellite radio will take listeners away from KCCK? Well, it’s not satellite radio itself that bugs me as much as this is just another trend toward big, faceless companies controlling the music we hear, instead of local people. When Clear Channel started buying multiple signals in cities large and small, company executives insisted the economies of scale would enable them to put interesting, niche formats on some stations that wouldn’t have to be as profitable, or at least as profitable as soon. Yeah, that’s happened.

If XM and Sirius merge, do you think they will put more jazz (for instance) on the combined service? Of course not, they’ll stick with the three flavors they have now and spend the money they’ve saved on some flavor-of-the-month talk host or music format.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still think there is value in a radio station where a local host picks music he or she thinks is worth sharing, working for a company that’s accountable to the community where the both the staff and listeners live.

Try finding that on a satellite. Heck, good luck finding it in most towns. Ours excepted, thanks to you!