Strange Radio Experience (again)

U2's "In the Street of No Name" was playing on the radio just now while I was flipping through my "commercial" email account. And I saw this: "Guitar World's October Issue Featuring The Edge is Here!"

FM 98.1 format change

I have written about my radio listening experience a lot,  mostly about jazz,  rock or sports talk.  I actually listen to 98.1 a lot too.  It's one of my top 6 presets!  So, what does this station play? Well, it was called Kiss FM in the past decade or so and played mostly 70s and 80s hits. A month ago it quietly changed its format to 96.5 KOIT-ish soft music. And it's got a new name: the Breeze. The transition was so smooth that I didn't find out until a week after! I missed those old upbeat stuff they used to play. I could be in cheesy disco mood once in a while too. After all, for old soft music I could go to 96.5. I guess the Breeze is trying to pick up the listeners who totally refuse to listen to newer hits, which KOIT is playing more often these days. Anyway, looks like the Breeze will remain on my top 6 after I heard them playing "Holding back the years" and "Don't dream this over" These 2 were among my favorites in the 80s!

AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol Game 1

A new chapter in the history of the mankind has been written yesterday: the hardest game to beat invented by the human being has finally been beaten by Artificial Intelligence. One of the best Go player in the world, 18 time world champ Lee Sedol, dubbed by Google as the Roger Federer of Go, started a 5 game series against Google's AI machine AlphaGo yesterday and lost game one. I watched the game live on YoutTube, along with 80k+ users all over the world. I thought Lee started well and built up some solid territories but AlphaGo slowly ate into all those and Lee resigned. Note: I am not a very strong player. According to this (seems to be) professional analysis, Lee actually overplayed in the beginning (which I as an amateur thought were strong move) and only caught up in the middle game but then eventually lost it. Basically, Lee made a few mistakes. AlphaGo did too but its play was closer to perfect.

(Side note: was listening to the classical channel this morning and the host mentioned something from a Scientific journal. I thought it has to do with this match but it's not. It was about researchers came up with a model to predict the gender, the age group and income level based on the apps on that person's phone. And it was way-off for that radio host :P So, machine learning still have a long way to go. On the other hand, I doubt human could predict much better either)

I Wished on the Moon

The local jazz station played Billie Holiday's version yesterday morning and grabbed my attention immediately. To be honest, I usually switch away from the channel as soon as I hear one syllable of vocal (of course, there are exceptions, when the singer sounds anything like Billie, Ella, Patricia Barber.......) Very simple yet elegant lyrics (even though I don't completely understand what they meant: something to do with wishing beautiful things to happen. Who doesn't?) Added more to it was the superb instrumentalists playing on it, especially the saxophonist. Turns out it's from the Verve Silver collection. Now my next question was: what was the original Verve release that contained the song? And after a little bit of research, I found out it's from "All or Nothing at All," (MGV 8329) a studio album recorded in 1956 and 1957 and released by Verve Records in 1958. Turned out the saxophonist was Ben Webster. And the other musicians included guitarist Barney Kessel (his playing was tasteful as usual) and trumpter Harry "Sweet" Edison. The same lineup had recorded several sessions and the tracks were released by Verve many time. Another album from the sessions was "Songs For Distingué Lovers," which contained 6 tunes originally. This 15-song digital edition (also containing "I Wished on the Moon") is offered by Amazon for only $5.99. What a great deal (even though some reviewers thought the extra tunes added by the 1997 re-release didn't fit in with the original 6 in terms of the mood and style)

Progressive Insurance Radio Ad

I don't like watching their TV commercial. The actress is probably quite good at acting but she's NOT pretty and looks kinda annoying (even though I know she has many fans) Man, its radio ad is even worse! I hear them a lot on TuneIn radio. Apparently I'm not the only one who couldn't stand them. Check out these negative comments on the forum of another online radio site.

Music app and channels

I have got a new Android device (more on that later.) This gave me a great opportunity to try out new music apps. The first one that I'd like to recommend is the TuneIn Radio App, which you have probably heard of, even before reading this, because of its advertisement. In fact, I went by their office location on U Ave in Palo Alto the other day! It's actually quite similar to XiiaLive, which I have been using to listen to ShoutCast stations (Shoutcast is a technology for serving audio streams and also a directory of internet radio) Like XiiaLive, it also has timer and alarm features, which I use quite often. It seems to offer different stations than ShoutCast though. From TuneIn Radio, I've found a few good channels:
1) Blue Rock from ROCKRADIO.com plays the likes of Buddy Guy, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Freddie King... etc. That's my favourite Blues sub-genre

2) Thrash Metal from ROCKRADIO.com plays my favourite Metal sub-genre. Death Angel, Testament, Slayer all played thrash. I've also heard Shadows Fall on it! And I "discovered" the German Thrash band Cripper featuring female vocalist Britta Görtz (another metal goddess after Angela Gossow)

3) Hair Bands from ROCKRADIO.com plays my guilty-pleasure Metal sub-genre. One of the first songs I heard was "Every Rose has its Thorn." Hard to not like it!

4) Radio Web Guitar Warrior seems to be European and played quite a bit of Power Metal. Not really my cup of tea except it usually features good guitar solo!

5) CLASSIC METAL RADIO plays a lot of mainstream/pop metal. I heard Aerosmith's Angel on it. Love that ballad! Also heard "Don't Look Back" from the "new" Queensryche (the one without original singer Geoff Tate but the vocal still sounds like him)

6) Guitar Jazz from JAZZRADIO.com. Jazz guitarists gotta love it!

7) Sax4Love (Smooth Jazz.) Another guilty-pleasure sub-genre :P

8) Jazz Radio Network

BTW, TuneIn listed both JAZZRADIO.com and ROCKRADIO.com with a Palo Alto address! Maybe it's the epicenter of internet radio.

星期日音樂檔案

今晚在家吃印度菜，播了些Norah Jones的名曲，實在「應景」。Jones是印度音樂大師Ravi Shankar的女兒；之後又播了Shankar另一個女兒Anoushka的作品，一首Solea揉合Flamenco及印度風情，十分夠味道。

下午去了SF Civic Symphony這個西岸最老牌的社區樂團，在SF Union Square古色古香的Sir Francis Drake Hotel內，舉行的免費音樂會，第一首是小史特勞斯這個我不甚欣賞的作曲家的作品，玩得熱熱鬧鬧，氣氛甚佳；第二首則是學小提琴的朋友不會感到陌生的巴哈Double Concerto。壓軸作品是Cesar Franck的唯一一首交響曲，指揮很用心講解曲中幾個多次出現的主題，我們一家都覺得最後一個movement比頭二個出色。

今早要做柴可夫，週日九時甚少聽古典台KDFC，原來在該時段有Baroque by the Bay專播（理所當然的）Baroque，其實我雖然甚為喜歡該時期風格的音樂，但除了巴哈及韋瓦弟之外卻聽得不多；打頭陣的是Alessandro Marcello的雙簧管協奏曲，現在重温一下。

Hard rock 101

I was listening to FM 96.5 on the car radio while taking my son to camp. It played its slogan: "Lite rock, less talk" after a Kelly Clarkson's song. My son asked me the difference between lite rock and hard rock. I figured it'd be easier to explain with an example so I switched to the next station on the preset: 107.7 and surely it was playing Led Zeppelin. Enough said. 

Topic of the day: FM 92.3 abandoned rock (again)

Classical radio station KDFC moving from the frequency 102.1 to 90.3 earlier this year was a surprise to me, and it was not a pleasant one because it used to have decent signal strength through out the SF Bay Area but you can't receive it in South Bay anymore after the switch. I haven't done much frequency surfing for a long time until then. And that's when I found out KSJO 92.3 was broadcasting alternative rock again. I started listening to 92.3 way back as it is one of the few rock station but I stopped in 2004 when it was switched to Mexican oldies format. It seems that the station was sold and switch back to rock in 2009 but I just found out recently. Well, it has abandoned rock again. Back in 2004 when the switch to Spanish happened, I wrote about the company was chasing the growing market of Spanish listener at that moment. Back then I was wondering if Chinese will be next, after Spanish. Well, my prediction was right on! Yes, 92.3 is broadcasting Mandarin pop music now. Now it's time to move my preset to another frequency. And I won't be the only one judging by the responses here.

Topic of the day: more on KKSF

I just wrote about KKSF has switched from smooth jazz to classic rock. You could read about it from its website As you could see, many listeners have left comments mourning the "death of smooth jazz on air"

I googled it and found a few articles about this change:
- a sarcastic one by San Jose MetBlogs
- another sarcastic one by SF Examiner
No one knows why it wants to compete with the existing classic rock stations. The playlist is not bad though. It will probably stay on my radio's preset.

If you still need your smooth jazz fix, just visit ClearChannel (the parent of KKSF)'s online smooth jazz stream. It's playing Sade's "Your Love is King" (isn't that so true for smooth jazz lover!?) It feels just like KKSF. I remember it played "Is it a crime?" a few days ago (Yes, killing off the smooth jazz station is indeed a crime!) BTW, there is no ad on ClearChannel's player so you won't be giving additional revenue to the company who killed off your favourite station! Sit back, relax and enjoy the music!

BTW, I came across this forum while searching for articles about KKSF and a lot of the posts seems to be written by people who know the radio business.

Music of the day: Riders On The Storm

It became my pick not because I like this song particularly (a pretty good song though) but because I heard it on the local Smooth Jazz station KKSF (103.7)

Wait a minute! The Doors didn't play Smooth Jazz, did they? Well, it's because the station has been changed to classic rock.

I'm really surprised because:
1) I thought smooth jazz has a good-sized market. IMO, nothing is better than smooth jazz when all you want is some relaxing background music.
2) smooth jazz listeners are perceived as high income ones. So it's perfect for selling ads of luxury products.
3) there are already quite a few classic rock statons in the area but KKSF was the only one that plays smooth jazz.

As much as I hate the term "smooth jazz" (if it's smooth, it's not jazz), I do listen to KKSF from time to time in the past 15 years, just for some Kenny G, David Sanborn, Acoustic Alchemy, Kirk Whalum, Jesse Cook...... (and they have a weekend "real" jazz program that coincide with the hours that KCSM plays "weird" jazz) It's sad to see this change.

Their website mention they still have a smooth jazz streaming link. I couldn't get it to work on the office computer though.

[FYI: the classic jazz program on KKSF was called "The Jazz Cafe" and was hosted by jazz pianist Dick Conte every Sunday]