When Cleveland wants to greet the world, here’s what it says: “Hi. I’m Daniel Peck and welcome to Live at the BOP STOP.”
Thousands of listeners in Japan, Belgium, Ireland—including a podcast downloader in North Korea–as well as the U.S. and Canada experience the richness of Cleveland’s jazz scene by tuning into radio broadcasts or downloading podcasts recorded at the Hingetown club and produced by Peck and his team.
In addition to the overseas affiliates, the roster of North American radio stations carting the one-hour program grew to 63 last night with news that WICN in Worcester, Massachusetts will carry the Best of 2024 program this evening, New Year’s Eve.
That’s pretty impressive for a project that began with a conversation at the BOP STOP bar, where Peck owns the corner stool nearest the door. Though he now works in software, a career that helps him fund the show’s production, Peck is a radio man. He started at the University of Toledo as the student manager of WXUT and spent several years at commercial radio stations and NPR affiliates.
But Peck’s radio love affair began as a boy in Detroit listening to the legendary WJZZ. “They basically ran live jazz performances all night. So I assumed this was a thing and that this thing was always going to be here,” he said. “Then you wake up one day and it’s 24/7 smooth jazz and what you grew up loving is gone.”
These memories stayed with Peck for 25 years until one night he walked up to former BOP STOP director Gabe Pollack. “I said, ‘Hey, Gabe, do you record these shows?” And he said, ‘Yeah, I got them all.’ That actually wasn’t true,” Peck said, “but being a radio person and having friends who are radio people, the idea was a pretty simple pitch, right?”
It helped that BOP STOP had a library of recorded performances that were cleared by the artists for broadcast, allowing the production team of Peck, Shawn Gilbert, Peter Naegele and Darren Thompson to quickly assemble an initial season of programs. “Once we figured out how to do it, it became very easy to do it,” Peck said.
As the executive producer, he writes and records the opening and closing remarks for an entire season of 15 episodes at a single session. These bracket the podcast, which usually consists of a full performance, and the radio package, which is edited to a 57-minute length. Remarkably, an entire program or podcast can take as little as an hour to put together. Credit the expertise of the staff and the efficiency of editing digital audio, but what makes this possible is an aesthetic decision made by Peck at the project’s inception.
“We’re not cutting too much. What you’re hearing on the show is literally what happened on the stage.” Why? “Jazz is inherently not perfect,” Peck said. “We try to leave as many of those ‘mistakes’ as we can, because that’s being true to improvisational performance-based jazz.”
The result is a program that captures all the high-wire excitement of musicians creating in the moment. It’s a quality that’s caught impressively on the Best of 2024 broadcast and podcast that drops on New Year’s Eve. Chosen by a jury of Peck, Thompson and BOP STOP director Bryan Kennard, it’s two hours of performances by 15 ensembles, all but five of which are based in northeast Ohio or have connections to the region.
BOP STOP regulars know how rare it is to not see Peck and his muse Mercedes Peterman at a performance, and he estimated that he attended perhaps half of the shows that make it to the radio. But an empty bar stool often means Peck is taking a portion of a set from an unusual vantage point, the men’s room.
Eliminating the visual element and the vibe of the room allows Peck to put himself in the shoes of a typical listener. “The point isn’t that I have to go to the bathroom.” he explained. ”I’m trying to understand how well [a performance] translates to someone who is not an active listener to the show but has the show on. That’s an important gauge of how useful this performance is.”
He’s right. I listened to the podcast on a walk around my neighborhood, and it’s remarkable how Thompson’s vivid recording brought Hingetown to Birdtown, if only in the middle of my head. Scanning the show notes, I was dismayed to note that of the 15 performances on the pod, I had been there for only one of them. Clearly, I need to get out more. We all do. It’s a cliché, it’s true, but jazz really is best appreciated live.
That’s not always possible, but the Live At The BOP STOP team is always there, bringing the best of Cleveland jazz to the wider world.
NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.
Red beans and ricely yours,
jc
