This was originally posted as the second episode of the Normal Bias Podcast on June 25, 2014 (the interview took place two days earlier, on the morning of the 23rd). The transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

In the mid-90s, I was going to college and just starting to scratch the surface of jazz. It was on my visits home to New Jersey that I’d turn on late night radio and listen to Ludwig Van Trikt on WRTI 90.1, “Jazz FM,” Philly’s 24-hour jazz station. It was his show Point of Departure that introduced me to jazz way beyond what I was listening to and gave me a laundry list of musicians to hunt down for my own college jazz shows. It was an honor to chat with Ludwig for the second episode of the podcast where we discussed his own introduction to jazz, the history of WRTI, and the state of jazz radio in Philadelphia.

Ryan: I’m happy to have with me today Ludwig van Trikt. Thank you for joining me today, Ludwig.

Ludwig: Thanks, thanks again. I really appreciate the invitation. I’m quite humbled and honored, Ryan.

Ryan: Well, it’s great to have you on. But before we even get to anything about your radio career, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your introduction to jazz and how early it started in your life.

Ludwig: When I was a kid, and I’m a baby boomer, So we’re going back to the mid-to-late ’60s.

I was fortunate to grow up in a household, and also in a neighborhood, where jazz was still a very vital part of the community. You could hear jazz at the local Birthday Bar, which is one of the bars that was in my neighborhood. It was on jukeboxes in various bars, too.

My brother, he was a very avid jazz fan. In addition, I had cousins, one cousin in particular, who was into, strangely enough, avant-garde jazz like Pharoah Sanders, late period John Coltrane. Alfonzo was his name. So, I got to hear the music at a very, very young age. And I can remember some of the first recordings–Sonny Rollins, “Freedom Jazz Suite,” Coleman Hawkins, “Think Deep,"–and just being riveted by these recordings. And even as a kid, having some sense of how they reflected the times then, which was the era of the Civil Rights Movement. I was able to connect the dots with “Freedom Suite” by reading about the recording and how it addressed the whole issue of African-Americans and our historical struggle for more rights.

I can remember certain experiences I had listening to WRTI. I got into listening to WRTI during a time where the format was very, very eclectic, very interesting. There were some great DJs, Aker Brown, who used to work for the Department of Recreation, and he was an avid tennis player. He had the nickname of “the Hawk.” I would always make sure that I was in the house to hear his program Friday nights. I think it came on late Friday nights. and just being, I can’t even describe the feeling, but just being drawn into the whole jazz world.

Edgar Brown, in particular, at WRTI, put things into an historical context. It was through him that I got to appreciate the late Horace Silver, who just passed away last week, I believe, Art Farmer… Edgar would read excerpts from the book by Hampton Hawes called “Raise Up Off Me” and excerpts from James Baldwin’s fictional accounts of jazz. It was just marvelous, great radio programming. Even the sister station WXBN, back then, had a more looser format than it does now. And I got to hear all kinds of jazz DJs like Joel Zepstein, John DiLiberto, those were some of the names on WXPN that I heard.

I remember having the experience, where I was listening to Grachan Moncur’s recording of the composition “When” with Archie Shepp, and it was one of my first times hearing Archie Shepp, and literally it felt like the hairs on the back of my neck like stood out from just  hearing the solo by Shepp just took me to just another place.

As it is with teenagers, you know, you go through different crises. I grew up in a pretty tough working class neighborhood and that was very racially tense. I had to deal with a lot of issues in terms of my being a light-skinned African-American and feeling like an outsider. I think the whole jazz thing also was a way for me to help shape my identity as a self-described outsider.

So, I listened to the station early, from being very young. I mean, like during the time I was in middle school. At the same time, I was listening to other kinds of music, too, because radio in general was just so open. I remember WDAS, the rhythm and blues station in Philly, used to even play jazz sometimes, late at night. So it was more of a fabric of the black community than it is now. And it just was just more organic. It was much like the Art Ensemble’s phrase, “Black music, ancient to the future.” Everything just kind of fit it together, you know?

From being an avid listener, as I got older, my voice started to deepen. I would call some of the DJs and some of them became familiar with me from me calling and asking questions and just learning about the music. Edgar Brown had invited me down to his program one night. I had wrote a poem, and he allowed me to read the bad poem on the air. (laughs) I don’t even recall what it was, but I just would have imagined it probably wasn’t very good. But he let me come in and sit in, and that was just so great.

And from calling Steve Rowland, who was then the music director, you know, he said, “Listen, you have a pretty good voice, why don’t you come down, do an audition, and see about getting on the air?” And this was during a time when WRTI was allowing people from “the community,” who weren’t students, to come down and if they had some knowledge about jazz and had some flavor to the concept of presenting jazz, you could audition and perhaps get on the air. Steve Rowland, he hired me and I was on the air for over, I believe over 15 years doing different programs out of the afternoon, which was more post-bop, mainstream jazz.

Ryan: When was that that you started?

Ludwig: You know, I’m pretty bad with dates, but this has to be the early 80s that I started broadcasting. thing. And I was also doing a program called Night Creature. That was my my moniker. I called myself Night Creature based on Duke Ellington’s description of jazz as being a “night creature.” And I also became a part of a community of broadcasters who were young, African-American, and we were like outcasts. It was Skip Jackson, who was a performance artist and currently working with the Philadelphia Jazz Project. Richard Nichols, who subsequently became and is the current manager of The Roots. There was a group of us that we just kind of clicked and hung out together, did programming together, did special programs.

I had this idea of combining jazz with jazz music, something called the Jazz Audio Journal and also some of our early programming concepts. I actually stayed on past the time that Richard and Skip had left WRTI. I was there doing various controversies. There was a challenge about the hiring of DJs–I remember Ted Eldridge–it seemed like a lot of African-American DJs left and they started enforcing the rule wherein you had to pretty much be a student to stay on. That kind of hastened my leaving, in addition to my still heavy work schedule created some conflicts.

But yeah, that is my early history with WRTI in a nutshell, and it led to some other avenues. I started doing record reviews for Cadence, and from having been on the air at WRTI for such a long period, it led to me being the jazz program director at the Painted Pride Arts Center, the marvelous performance space in Old City. I did their programming for several years.

My current pursuits of still writing for Cadence, it’s now a online magazine, and doing occasional things for AllAboutJazz.com, hosting various shows, becoming one of the early people in Philly who started producing so-called avant-garde jazz at the Painted Bride. All these things were a result of me having been on the radio for all those marvelous years. As Billie Holiday used to often say, the only time she truly was happy was when she sung, I just had such a deep happiness when I was on the air. Really, really loved it. Miss it dearly. And felt as though we, when I was working with Skip and Richard, I felt as though we were doing some important stuff in terms of interviews and talking to the various cats. You know, like the last vestiges of a deep sense of jazz still being in the so-called community. The music itself, of course, is brought now to the world, which is a great thing, and we now have all kinds of people that are playing jazz and involved in jazz, and I like to think to think I played a small part in some of its evolution in terms of the city’s history with the music.

The programming at the Painted Bride was largely successful with sometimes very difficult artists. I mean, artists that weren’t in the mainstream. I remember Lester Bowie drawing like close to 700 people for two sets, you know? This is because we had programmers like myself and Skip Jackson and Richard Nichols playing the music. Richard, in particular, helped me come up with a concept of how to do a segueway. A lot of times you have various DJs of various genres, they just play music, but Richard was like the first cat I heard where it was a sense of programming that flowed. He would play like. maybe. Sister Loretta Tharpe and Julius Hemphill, and you got to see the connection with the blues. And from him, I started developing my own flavor with that and would put a lot of effort into the program and how things flowed. I would always spend hours during the week thinking of what to play. I had some strange musical fetishes, wherein I didn’t play–I tried to have different instrumentation–I wouldn’t play too much saxophones … if one piece featured a saxophone, I wouldn’t do another piece featuring a saxophone. I would break it up with maybe a trio or say M’Boom, the percussion ensemble that Max Roach led, so that you’re drawn into a listening experience. Back then there were other elements that were seeping into jazz, like performance poetry, and I used to put that kind of stuff with my music. Maybe something clean by Richard Pryor, you know, just to give it a, just letting it be a different experience when you listen to the radio.

I continued to do new segments of my program and interviews. I got to talk with the great Max Roach and David Murray… a whole bunch of cats came down to the studio.. It was just a really, really great experience, and that’s pretty much it. In a nutshell, I’m still involved with the periphery of the music by doing interviews. I don’t right now do any CD reviews, but doing interviews for Cadence, I’ve been pretty prolific in doing a lot of interviews. This is against the backdrop of, for the past several years, working like 80 hours a week. I’ve worked two full-time jobs for a long time, and somehow have been able to fit these things into a pretty heavy schedule in addition to being married and having four children and 11 grandchildren. But it was always important for me to stay connected to the music.

My record collection is still pretty, mammoth. It’s huge.

Ryan: What I would give to go through those records. What I would give to see that collection. My goodness, I can only imagine.

Ludwig: Yeah, I used to get so much stuff, and I still get stuff sent to me as a result of my being affiliated with Cadence and All About Jazz. So I’m going through a fun thing where I’m trying to get down to the desert island listing, you know, if you’re on a desert island, what recordings would you bring with you. The problem always is there’s so much great music coming out that you can’t limit it to just a couple dozen recordings. There’s still hundreds and hundreds of stuff that I have. But yeah, I’ll pull out recordings that were promotional copies for DJs that were sent to me and it just brings back the whole memory of having been at WRTI.

Ryan: When I was in in college in the mid 90s I was going to school down in Virginia and it was just at that point of my life where I was really kind of starting to get deeper into jazz beyond the the very basics. I grew up in South Jersey, so when I came back to visit my family and I would listen to Philadelphia Radio and that was how I got, how I initially heard Point of Departure. And you know, from the first point I heard your show, it was… I would say that was the show–even though I only got to hear a few episodes over the years because it was only during my visits back–that was the show that really got me delving deeper into jazz, gave me some new names to check out. It was very influential in terms of what I ended up listening to in terms of jazz later on, getting into the avant-garde and the free jazz and some of the kind of more left-field things.

Ludwig: Well, that’s great to hear. I am flattered.

Ryan: I know back in the late ’90s, early 2000s was when WRTI finally moved away from being all jazz, as “Jazz FM,” and kind of split between jazz and classical. But I know that that was something that was even being discussed and going on back as early as the mid-1980s. Can you talk a little bit about WRTI and kind of the inner workings there and the focus on jazz at one point where that was their whole thing and then how they shifted away from that?

Ludwig: Yeah, well, I’d like to be more exacting with the dates, and I’m just not able to recall exact dates, but I remember there was a marked difference when Ted Eldridge became the general manager of the station wherein he wanted jazz to be more accessible and I don’t think he particularly cared for the type of programming that I was doing. They tried to get back to it being a student lab for students, which I, you know, I understand. […] Temple was doing so much expanding into the neighborhood that surrounded it, there was an informal agreement that people from “the community” could come on and do programming.

Under Ted Eldridge there were different controversies, different fights, aesthetic battles, you know. But what it comes down to is–I can’t really fault him, he wasn’t the main cause of this shifting in terms of there being classical and jazz. On some level, I think the community kind of took us for granted. When we used to have the radiothons, the fundraisers, they largely were successful, but it got to a point where they weren’t. And I can’t recall those exact years when things took a change, but if people had put more money behind how they felt, it might’ve been more persuasive in terms of arguing for jazz to continue to be on a 24-hour basis. But we lost that battle, and now jazz, I believe, is from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., if I’m not mistaken.

I haven’t listened to WRTI in quite some time. I’ll listen to J. Michael Harrison every now and then. Although his approach to music is really different from mine in that he comes to the music from having heard a lot of [hip-hop and] fusion. He just brings a whole different aesthetic that […] there’s a marked difference in what I like to listen to and what he does. But there are always, throughout the station’s history, various aesthetic battles and rumors that it was gonna be a rock station or they were gonna do away with jazz. It’s always been those kind of controversies.

We still have a jazz station. I can’t really say in all honesty how good it is because I don’t really listen to it, for a variety of reasons. But it’s certainly nothing like the heyday of the music when I and a number of other people were on there, and even decades before us, when you had people like The Bus, Edgar Brown, who I mentioned earlier, a number of other people who were on who were really great programmers. It reflected just a broad sense of radio being much more experimental.

On other stations, even like I mentioned, our sister station, WXPN, and DAS radio back then was much more experimental than it is now, where you have KISS 100 or I don’t know the other corporations that are involved in the programming. It was fun. You could be on the air and make terrible mistakes, but I think people sensed the adventure of everything. It was kind of reflective of the music. Jazz is an improvisationally-based music, and sometimes it’s deeply flawed, but emotionally convincing. I like to think that that’s what we did, and I did, when I was on the air. I don’t think you’ll ever have that kind of radio programming again in Philadelphia. Maybe on the internet, but not in Philadelphia in terms of actual radio stations. Things are just very, very regimented now.

Ryan: Can you tell me a little bit about, since it’s the show that that I have archived on [Normal Bias] about Point of Departure specifically. I’m going to assume it was inspired by the Andrew Hill album title?

Ludwig: Well, yeah, I kind of plagiarized Martin Seaborn, one of the young one-air personalities who came on. Martin, interestingly enough, was very attracted to the very outer fringes of the avant-garde if you had listened to his program. He had the program Point of Departure. He left the station in controversy that I don’t want to get into, but nevertheless when he left they needed somebody to, you know, continue his slot and I just continued using the name. I love the idea of “Point of Departure” because, as you mentioned, it was the name of one of Andrew Hill’s iconic records, and also was the type of programming aesthetic that I think both me and Martin shared, although I didn’t go as far out on the avant-garde as he did. But yeah, so that was a program that came on from midnight until three in the morning. For a number of years I took the helm of being on air during that time and bringing my own aesthetic flow of things, if you will. And that is after having done two other conceptual programs, as I mentioned, the one called Out of the Afternoon, which I think I came on midday on like a Tuesday or something, I don’t even recall for how many years that was, and then Night Creature, which was one of my overnight programs where I played largely the outcats, if you will, although I mixed it in with some other sort of things. That, in essence, was Point of Departure.

I left largely because–I think I had the option to continue–but I left largely because I was just so involved in working and, you know, it never paid. During the time I was on WRTI, you never got paid. I had to support a family, so I just had to eventually just wind things down.

Ryan: What are you listening to these days, any younger artists that you’re particularly taken with?

Ludwig: Yeah. Craig Taborn, of course, comes to mind, the marvelous pianist. I still remain deeply, deeply in love with David Murray and pretty much everything that he does. He still remains one of my favorite artists. Fortunately, there’s still a number of artists that are still around and making great music.

In terms of the younger cats, Justin Faulkner, the drummer. There’s been a number of artists that have come out of Philadelphia who just have been fantastic instrumentalists. I mentioned Justin… Rodney Green, who you don’t even know are from Philly… Mark Copeland, the pianist… and they’re all part of the music that I’m listening to. I continue to buy a lot of recordings, to a fault. My wife and I are always arguing, she says, “How many CDs can you have?” I’m always trying to support the music and buy the music. So my collection is still continuing despite this effort to try and weed some things out. It’s so hard because so much great music is still coming out. Yeah, so that’s basically it.

I’m just fortunate enough to live in a lifetime–I mentioned how big an influence Sonny Rollins was on me appreciating jazz–he’s still alive! Ornette Coleman is still alive. It’s just great to have these guys living and still being vital.

Ryan: Well, listen, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today.

Ludwig: Like I said, I can’t thank you enough for doing what you’re doing. I really, really appreciate it.