During the mid-1990s, Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, a first-time collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio, began airing on hundreds of NPR affiliate stations throughout America.

An ambitious series of 26 hour-long documentary programs, Wade explored 200 years of black sacred music, including spirituals, ring shouts, lined hymns, jazz, and gospel. The series also featured the insights of music creators, performers, listeners, and historians who could place African American sacred music traditions within the social, political, and cultural context of their times

Mahalia Jackson & Paul Robeson.  The Staple Singers & The Mississippi Mass Choir.  Mary Lou Williams & Kirk Franklin.  The Fisk Jubilee Singers & Marian Anderson.  Be Be & Ce Ce Winans & Take 6.

Those were just a few of the artists prominently featured in the series.

Conceived and hosted by Smithsonian Institution curator, artist, and MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Wade required an intensive, five-year-long fundraising, research, and production journey of commitment by a host of dedicated radio producers, researchers, engineers, historians and music collectors.

And the series eventually won a Peabody Award and other national awards of distinction.

As Wade’s associate producer, I was responsible for writing and producing 13 of the series’ programs.  So come behind the scenes with me.  In the just published, Wade in the Water: The Making of a Groundbreaking Radio Documentary Series (in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, University of California Press), I describe Wade’s production journey from the vantage point of an insider.

The article serves as a personal reflection on the making of a series that would set the standard for future long-form, NPR-based music documentary productions, such as Making the Music (hosted by Wynton Marsalis) and Jazz Profiles (hosted by Nancy Wilson) – series on which I also served as one of the producers.

Enjoy!

McCoy Tyner   December 11, 1938 – March 6, 2020

I first heard McCoy Tyner perform “live” in concert during the 1970s.  Some of my college friends and I had pooled our meager resources and tried to look (and act) older than we were so that we wouldn’t have any trouble getting into a Chicago nightclub to hear Tyner and his band perform.

Our little group of jazz lovers and Tyner enthusiasts were serious about sitting as close to the club’s bandstand as possible.  We wanted to see for ourselves exactly how Tyner produced the cascade of sound that was his trademark.

We weren’t disappointed.

Sitting near the piano and just behind Tyner, we could see his hands fly across the piano keyboard.  His powerful attack, invigorating energy and shifting harmonies were breathtaking.  And his ballads?  Tyner could make you cry with his sensitive, often spiritual interpretation of his own compositions or other standards.

From that point on, I bought every Tyner album I could.  And I made it my business to see him perform live whenever possible.  Many years later, I served as a writer/producer for NPR’s award-winning series, Jazz Profiles, hosted by Nancy Wilson.   As a result, I was able to interview Tyner, as well as musicians such as Bobby Hutcherson, Mulgrew Miller and Dianne Reeves who could talk about his outsized influence.

Excerpts from those interviews can be heard in the episode I produced for Jazz Profiles.  So to honor the life and contributions of this dynamic musician, I invite you to listen to McCoy Tyner: The Pianist.  

He will be missed.  But his musical legacy lives on.