John Schaefer

I've talked before on the blog about soundtracks, and how they can be more than simple background music - most recently, last week when Jim Jarmusch joined us. But Michael Giacchino's music for the hit ABC television series Lost is an interesting case. For one thing, we don't expect ...

A restaurant tells you a lot about itself by the way it's lit and by the way it sounds. Bright and noisy, with pop and classic rock at full volume means eat your food (but maybe don't pay too close attention to it), have some drinks, and see who's at ...

I hadn't noticed a particular upswing lately in the number of country songs proudly and loudly proclaiming their creators to be Small-Town Boys. (And girls, I suppose, though this does seem to be mostly a dude thing.) But then, I don't pay attention to the contemporary country scene all that ...

I'LL BE WITH YOU IN JUST A SECOND! I JUST WANNA HEAR THE END OF THIS SONG! 'CAUSE I REALLY LIKE IT, YOU KNOW?! OK - WAIT. THERE, I'LL TAKE THE EARBUDS OUT NOW! OKAY, SO... oh. Okay, so I guess maybe I was shouting a little. It's just that ...

Concert pianist Jade Simmons performs live on WNYC's Soundcheck with John Schaefer.

When the economy tanks, everyone feels the pain. Even the New York Yankees, who in the run-up to the opening of the new Yankee Stadium gave every indication that they were immune to the effects of the recession, are finding themselves slashing their (ridiculously high) ticket prices in the face ...

Film makers can sometimes be really obsessive about the music in their films. The late Stanley Kubrick, for example. He was notorious for falling in love with his placeholder music - the records he'd play to certain scenes before the actual film score was composed, just so he'd have something ...

At first, today's Smackdown topic seems an easy one to answer. Which instrument has had the bigger impact on jazz, the sax or the trumpet? Gotta be the sax, right? I mean, sure, the trumpet had Louis Armstrong and Clark Terry and Miles Davis. But John Coltrane, Lester Young, Coleman ...

"Authenticity" has become a big part of the music conversation - usually among musicians and critics more than rank-and-file listeners, but still, the talk about who's raps are more "real" has certainly become more commonplace. The "authenticity" argument stalks through London's music circles too - when Kate Nash began to ...

There's a scene in How The Grinch Stole Christmas where the Grinch is explaining to his hapless dog Max why he simply must stop Christmas from coming to Whoville. Being a grinchy sort, he hates all the good will and the presents and stuff, but what really gets him, he ...

I have always loved thoroughbred horse racing. I mean, I love sports in general: baseball (Yankees), football (Giants), real football - aka "soccer" (Arsenal, from north London), hockey (Islanders). But there's a difference with horse racing. Because the bettors are so much a part of the sport, you feel involved ...

Today's show is our first live broadcast from our new Greene Space, a ground-floor studio for live music, live radio, film, lectures, community events, etc. And since we're taking this step out of the radio tower and into the actual community of Downtown Manhattan, we're taking the opportunity to talk ...

Poor Bob Dylan. He's got a tough act to follow, a huge shadow cast by his much younger self. But give him credit for rescuing a career that seemed to have slid into irrelevance and rediscovering his voice (or discovering a new voice, perhaps) in this decade. Modern Times was ...

The story of Cafe Society, and its sister club, Cafe Society Uptown, is a remarkable one - an intentionally integrated club in New York at a time when even here, such things did not exist. Founder Barney Josephson's memoir, Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People, tells ...

On Wednesday we talked with a sociologist about the "community" of music listeners known as Deadheads. Traveling tribes of Grateful Dead fans really do form a community, Rebecca Adams of UNC-Greensboro told us, despite not having a single fixed place to live - which one would think would be a ...

I'm here to tell you that it WAS possible to be an impressionable teenager in the '70s and fall under the sway of both La Monte Young, the godfather of Minimalism, master of drones, creator of magical overtone effects and abstruse theories of music and mathematics; and The Ramones. That ...

In our miniseries of shows on Super Fans, you just had to know there'd be a time when we focused on the ultimate Super Fans - that curious tribe of wandering fans known as Deadheads. For decades, two or even three generations of them crisscrossed the country in their beat ...

On the face of it, it seems a ridiculous question. Are record stores worth saving? I'm a huge music fan - of course I'm supposed to think they're worth saving. And I do... kind of. Just not for me. Record stores are for the nostalgic, and the audiophiles, and the ...

New York, NY —

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced this afternoon, and among the winners -- New York based composer Steve Reich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. WNYC's John Schaefer was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Jury that chose Reich.

It's getting close to 4 years since the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina put the plight of New Orleans on the front page of the news. And inevitably, it has been pushed further and further down the list of daily news stories. But things in New Orleans are not yet "back ...