Seattle Radio’s Jazz Man is turning off the turntable.
Ken Wiley is retiring from KNKX
“He broke every rule in radio, but during the fund drive, the phones went off the hook,” says KNKX general manager Joey Cohn of DJ Ken Wiley, whose eccentric, beloved, 41-year-old Sunday afternoon show, “Art of Jazz,” hit its final note in December. “The only other show I ever saw that had that power was ‘Car Talk.’”
Indeed, like those chatty car mechanics, Wiley improvised a one-of-a-kind program. For three hours, drawing from an enormous private collection amassed over a lifetime of prowling through secondhand stores, he would spin sets of scratchy, vintage 78 rpm records by the likes of blues queen Memphis Minnie, swing band pioneer Fletcher Henderson or tenor saxophone maestro Coleman Hawkins. If he felt like playing five ballads in a row, he did, never mind rules about “pacing.” Dead air? Hey, what’s a long pause or two?
