Retired Judge Sid Gribetz, NY’s Leading Jazz Archivist-DJ, Reflects on 40 Swinging Years at Columbia’s WKCR-FM

Sid Gribetz is unarguably one of New York’s leading jazz savants. He’s the author of multiple discographies and a sometime professor of jazz history who writes frequent album reviews and has contributed liner notes to more than 50 recordings.

But his real renown comes from a 40-plus-year association with Columbia University’s volunteer-run radio station WKCR (89.9 FM), where he first started dabbling as an undergraduate in the late 1970s, then returned as a regular part of the lineup in the early 80s. Ever since he’s hosted thousands of hours of jazz programming, including extended playlists of Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, along with underrated greats such as vocalist Lorez Alexandria and pianist Dodo Marmarosa. Name virtually any jazz heavyweight and it’s certain that Gribetz has dedicated serious on-air time to showcasing, often in multiple sessions.

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Now around 70 (he’d prefer not to say precisely), Gribetz holds a rightful seat alongside the city’s legendary – mostly deceased – jazz jocks, including Alan Grant, Ed Beech, “Symphony” Sid Torin, Michael Bourne and Grammy winner Phil Schaap, himself a KCR hero who passed in 2021. Last year Gribetz received a coveted award for broadcast excellence by the Jazz Journalists Association.

Gribetz, who resides in the West 90s, usually lugs a carton of his own records and CDs up to KCR’s studios in Alfred Lerner Hall on the Columbia campus, though he notes the station has its own “extraordinary” music library.

It’s not always easy to catch him live – his regular “Daybreak Express” slot (named after the Duke Ellington song) is Tuesday mornings from 5-8:20 am, plus “random” taped shows during the week. He’s put in his dues at KCR, up to 35-40 hours per month, including time researching and prepping his shows as well as mentoring Columbia students – all that even during his decades-long career as a lawyer and then a highly respected New York State family judge in the Bronx. “I’m just as professional in the studio as I was on the bench,” he says proudly of both sides of his working life.

Fortunately, Gribetz’s jazz erudition and old-school radio stylings are now available anytime – thanks to a digital archive he’s been uploading since mid-2024 in podcast format called “The Gone Sounds of Jazz with Sid Gribetz” (gribetzsid.podbean.com). There are around 100 installments (new ones posted weekly) – all of them originally produced at KCR – each one with biographical notes in appreciation of the artists featured and their place in the jazz galaxy.

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Some segments stem from KCR’s marathon birthday tributes, with Sid taking the mic for up to five hours of curated tunes and insights. Consider this succinct summation of tenor man Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis:

“One of the dynamic ‘tough’ tenor saxes…his full-bodied approach was brashly swinging yet could be sensitive and romantic. Jaws had a wide-ranging career, inspired by the big bands but also coming up at Minton’s and in the be-bop era as well, with an R&B tinge, and later a master of the organ-tenor groove.  Always blowin’.”

In addition to iconic instrumentalists and vocalists (sample his wonderful show on the vocalese trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross), Gribetz devotes considerable time to composers, among them Tadd Dameron, Jimmy Van Heusen and Arthur Schwartz. He’ll also hone in on key years of a musician’s output – say, drummer Art Blakey from 1958-64 or 50s-vintage Count Basie and Ben Webster.

In an era where self-appointed tastemakers strut their smarts in manic 30-second Instagram posts – “check out these top all-time Coltrane tunes!” – Gribetz takes a leisurely, professorial approach to the music, ticking off everyone in the band, down to the bongo player in a Nat King Cole recording. True jazz nerds will appreciate his call-outs of record labels, knowing how different an artist sounded on a Prestige or Verve album vs. one made for Impulse or Blue Note. Ditto his care to identify the exact date of a recording – as in bassist Charlie Mingus’s November 13, 1959 session for Columbia.

He especially enjoys showcasing lesser-known talents, such as an all-but-forgotten singer named Beverley Kenney, of whom Gribetz writes was “apparently a melancholy and troubled soul. It ended tragically when she committed suicide in April 1960 at the age of 28. A promising career was cut short. Yet, many insiders and vocalists from the era long remember Kenney and often comment on her unique talents. She left behind a legacy of mature, swinging and cool jazz singing.”

Gribetz’s voice is authoritative yet quiet and conversational, and unmistakably New York, reflecting his city roots. “I hope I bring some gravitas to the music,” he says, adding he tries not to overshare like his old friend Phil Schaap, who tended to long discourses. Like a great player he knows when to “lay out,” as when during a lengthy show on Billie Holiday he tells listeners to expect a minimum of interruptions, joking he’s the “strong, silent type.”

With his silver hair and beard plus his wise man demeanor, younger fans assume he was hanging around the bandstand at the Half Note or Five Spot to see Dizzy, Bird and Bud Powell in their Bebop prime. “Those guys died before I came of age,” he explains.

Instead, he logged late nights in the 70s and 80s at downtown clubs like the Village Vanguard and Bradley’s checking out modern wonders like trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, vibraphonist Milt Jackson and pianist Cedar Walton – “before I could even legally buy a drink at the bar!”

He later frequented the jazz joints that once dotted the Upper West Side, such as J’s Upstairs, a second-story haven above a mattress store on Broadway and West 97^th Street that closed in the 1990s, and Augie’s, a cozy jazz dive bar on Broadway and 105^th that today houses the decidedly more refined (and cigarette-free!) Smoke. There was also Mikell’s at 97^th and Columbus, where Whole Foods now stands – Art Blakey was there “all the time,” Gribetz remembers. And of course, the roving Jazzmobile that still offers summer performances at Grant’s Tomb, as well as a regular concert series at the 79^th Street boat basin.

One disappointment that still stings was seeing Miles Davis at Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fischer) in the early 1970s. Waiting in line for hours with a friend, “I kept thinking, what could be more beautiful than seeing Miles play ‘Round Midnight’ or ‘My Funny Valentine?” Gribetz remembers. Instead, he was assaulted by Davis’s high-decibel electric band. “I plotzed!” he laments. (Not to worry – Gribetz just posted a new Davis segment on his podcast focused on 1953-54.)

The experience hardened his distaste for so-called fusion jazz, though he remains an advocate for soul-charged electric organ-guitar groups headlined by the likes of Charles Earland and Jimmy Smith. Teeing up a 1972 Earland rendition of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” on his KCR show Gribetz effuses, “Charlie turned a syrupy pop song into a grooving, infectious, danceable toe-tapping swinging jazz vehicle.”

Eschewing social media, Gribetz is enjoying the new reach of his podcast, with listeners in 45 states as well as Germany, Singapore, Brazil, the UK, Malaysia, Kuwait, Moldova, Bulgaria and Ghana. And he always happens to have some printed flyers on hand to pass out promoting his podcast, as he did when meeting some New Zealanders at downtown club Small’s recently.

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“I still feel connected to the magic of radio, when you could turn the dial late at night and pick up unusual stations all over the place,” he says. “Today, streaming platforms are dictated by algorithms. I hope people tune into me because of my taste and discretion in selecting quality material. Of course, I’m starting with the best. If I do a show on Mingus or Clifford Brown, how could it not be good?”  Ruefully, he recalls when New York’s all-jazz station WRVR-FM abruptly switched to country format in 1980. “That was a big shanda!”

Gribetz admits he doesn’t get around much lately to catch live performances – “I did my share of closing the clubs at 3 am,” he says. He misses old musician friends like Etta Jones and Teddy Charles, but stays connected with 91-year-old tenor man Houston Person, who maintains a recurring gig at Smoke. He also communes with his departed pal Phil Schaap – “Forget about jazz, I just wish we could talk about the Mets.”

And he has no plans to give up his spot at KCR. “It’s a one-man operation – I like to say I sweep up the place, as well as pick up the phone and run my own soundboard,” he says.

Before he retired from the bench, he had to rush from his morning show up to the Bronx courthouse for a full day of trial work and meetings. I used to see him wearily emerging from the West 96^th Street subway in the evenings, carrying an enormous briefcase and never dressed in more than a sweater and jacket even in the coldest weather, with a thousand-yard stare.

These days are a little easier for the eminent jurist and jazz DJ. “Now after doing Daybreak Express,” he confesses, “I get to go home and take a nap.”

Longtime Upper West Sider and jazz lover Allan Ripp runs a press relations firm in New York

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