Mark your calendars, set the clocks: Jon Solomon’s 24th Annual 24-Hour Holiday Radio Show is coming soon! The marathon begins on Saturday, December 24 at 6:00 PM ET and ends Sunday, December 25 at 6:00 PM ET.

It’s not Christmas without Jon’s annual holiday marathon. Seriously! From the absurd and bizarre to the beautiful and almost-kinda-holy, Jon’s show traverses the terrain of holiday music. No two marathons are alike, and perhaps that’s why listeners both near and far flock to the radio and/or webstream. So says Inside Jersey:

Forget the Bing Crosby-Nat King Cole-Mariah Carey loop that seems to air on every station in every mall – Solomon mixes covers of traditional hits with songs by bands from the region, recordings lost to attics and basements, and esoteric picks like “Mr. Russian, Please Don’t Shoot Down Santa’s Sleigh,” a Cold War-era number.

Which is not to be confused with “Can Santa Miss Those Missiles,” Solomon says.

You can RSVP for this show on Facebook.

Jon wants you to know that if you would like to make some requests, by all means get in touch.

Watch a live stream of everything happening in Studio A (goes live on December 24th):

Cards and flowers may be sent to 1124 Larkin Way Napa, CA 94558 after Wednesday. Per the request of Dr. Cosmo and his family, donations can be made to WPRB.

A memorial in the Princeton area is currently being planned.

Here’s what fellow WPRB DJs and DJ alumni have to say about Dr. Cosmo:

One of the joys of being a member of the WPRB community is getting to know some truly amazing people. George was one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met. One particular story he told me sums up for me George’s mischievous sense of humor: He was headed to a King Crimson show around ’81/’82 and he got the idea to bring a frisbee, make his way to the front of the crowd, and wing it DIRECTLY at Bill Bruford’s bombastic gong. Crimson had, (and still has,) a behemoth touring setup, with a ludicrous number of racks and extraneous percussive instruments and it was exactly the kind of playful but harmless gesture that poked fun at that without really disrupting the show. He actually pulled it off, no doubt causing a wave of uncomfortable shifting and sidelong glares from prog fans all around him, then receded back into the crowd! Brilliant! I’ll miss George’s energy, his bottomless enthusiasm for music, his humor, and, of course, his great stories. Friday nights on WPRB will never be the same. – Lizbot, “Doubleplusgood”

George believed in the magic of radio and aimed for each show he created to form an alternate universe if possible though he might settle when they were merely much more than the sum of their parts. He was also an incredibly decent, public-spirited, and humble human being. – John Weingart, “Music You Can’t Hear on the Radio”

WPRB became considerably less creative and challenging overnight. For some reason in the hours since I heard this sad news I keep thinking of your “traffic reports” during the classical programs you hosted one summer and they bring a smile to my face. Thank you for two decades of unparalleled broadcasting and friendship. – Jon Solomon

Like many of us in WPRB-land, I was deeply saddened today to learn that our friend and colleague George Mahlberg, better known as “Dr. Cosmo,” had passed away this weekend. George was a true renaissance man with limitless interests and passions, and a consummate professional in everything he did. WPRB has lost a true friend and major presence.  – SKM

One of my very first shows on WPRB was subbing for the DJ in the timeslot before Dr. Cosmo’s “Nocturnal Transmissions.” The last song of my show was a tune on vinyl — I think it may have been The Tubes’ “White Punks on Dope” — and it was going to run over about 90 seconds into Dr. Cosmo’s time I, of course, told the good doctor he could pod it down if he wanted to start his program promptly. Instead, as soon as the clock struck 10 p.m., he abruptly stopped the 12-inch with his hand and then started spinning the record backward at different speeds all the way to the beginning of the song. At first, I was little irked and thought his action somewhat rude, until I realized that those 4 or so minutes of manipulated backward music was far more provocative than any of the sounds I had filled the airwaves with over the previous three hours. I’ve since on more than one occasion bragged about my clever “collaboration” with Dr. Cosmo. – Paddy, “All Ages Show”

[W]e had the good fortune to have Dr. Cosmo sit in with us during our show, as we had the slot before his. We had a lot of laughs, and his musical knowledge was second to none. I could ask him about some obscure sixties band, and he would whip out his Ipod and have whoever I was talking about already stored there. I particularly enjoyed the looseness of his show, and the knowledge that you could never predict where he was going next, be it some unknown European prog band, a forgotten garage band, or a total improv on some topic or event that others would never even think of, let alone broadcast it from the seat of their pants. — Frank, “Mike and Frank’s Radio Free America”

Cosmo came on board at WPRB sometime in 1991—about a year prior to me, but his experience and radio wizardry far surpassed anything in my stable. He was older than most of PRB’s other non-student DJs, and had a long résumé of radio credentials, reaching all the way back to the 70s when he’d been a programmer at L.A.’s then-adventurous K-Rock. He was also a brilliant storyteller, had a voracious appetite for unusual sounds, and most of all, he really enjoyed the company of young people who were passionate about radio. To call him an inspiration and a hero may sound trite, but after spending the last 18 hours reckoning with the news of his cruel departure, I’m having trouble denying how appropriate those terms are. Recollections on his Facebook page, as well as the phone calls and emails I’ve fielded from former WPRB colleagues seem to validate the sentiment. There are probably dozens of mic break techniques I’ve nicked from him over the years, and I feel no shame in admitting it. WPRB was beyond fortunate to have a shepherd like him, even if only a small minority of the staff were aware of how incredible his talents were. – Mike Lupica, “Hip Transistor”

Dr. Cosmo left a mark on everyone he met. His incredible radio voice and physical presence were backed with a lifetime of amazing stories to tell. He had a way of relating his adventures that was engaging and not prententious, though many of them were certainly brag-worthy. His life had taken various paths – astrophysicist, DJ, actor, writer…and he was a mentor to my budding Photoshop ambitions, having created the much reproduced “In-A-Gadda-Da-Oswald”, a brilliant retake on Jack Ruby’s assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald. – Stephanie Obodda, WPRB DJ alumna

Dr. Cosmo siezes control of the airwaves during WPRB’s inaugural membership drive, October 2007 (courtesy of Adam Flynn):

Pledge drive showdown w Dr Cosmo, Fall 2007 by adamflynn

Please join us on Friday night at 10PM ET for a special on-air event to pay tribute to our friend and colleague.

If you have memories of Dr. Cosmo and “Nocturnal Transmissions,” please share them in the comments — we’d love to hear from you!

Mark your calendars, set the clocks: Jon Solomon’s 23rd Annual 24-Hour Holiday Radio Show is coming soon! The marathon begins on Friday, December 24 at 6:00 PM ET and ends Saturday, December 25 at 6:00 PM ET.

It’s not Christmas without Jon’s annual holiday marathon. Seriously! From the absurd and bizarre to the beautiful and almost-kinda-holy, Jon’s show traverses the terrain of holiday music. No two marathons are alike, and perhaps that’s why listeners both near and far flock to the radio and/or webstream. So says Inside Jersey:

Forget the Bing Crosby-Nat King Cole-Mariah Carey loop that seems to air on every station in every mall – Solomon mixes covers of traditional hits with songs by bands from the region, recordings lost to attics and basements, and esoteric picks like “Mr. Russian, Please Don’t Shoot Down Santa’s Sleigh,” a Cold War-era number.

Which is not to be confused with “Can Santa Miss Those Missiles,” Solomon says.

You can RSVP for this show on Facebook.

Jon wants you to know that if you would like to make some requests, by all means get in touch.

The 2010 Xmas Playlist will be updated in real time.

Watch a live stream of everything happening in Studio A (goes live on December 24th):

Listen to 103.3 fm WPRB on Wednesday, April 28th at 8:00 pm ET as Jon Solomon welcomes legendary New Jersey jokecore band Detention to his show.

Back together for the first time in two decades, Detention’s appearance on WPRB is just their second show since their heyday. The band can be seen live one more time, at The Record Collector in Bordentown, NJ on Saturday, May 1st.

Listen to the band’s bile-coated 1983 single “Dead Rock N Rollers”:

Here’s a brief video preview of Wednesday night’s session:

Mark your calendars, set the clocks: Jon Solomon’s 22nd Annual 24-Hour Holiday Radio Show is almost here! The marathon begins on Wednesday, December 24 at 6:00 PM ET and ends Thursday, December 25 at 6:00 PM ET.

It’s not Christmas without Jon’s annual holiday marathon. Seriously! From the absurd and bizarre to the beautiful and almost-kinda-holy, Jon’s show traverses the terrain of holiday music. No two marathons are alike, and perhaps that’s why listeners both near and far flock to the radio and/or webstream. So says Inside Jersey:

Forget the Bing Crosby-Nat King Cole-Mariah Carey loop that seems to air on every station in every mall – Solomon mixes covers of traditional hits with songs by bands from the region, recordings lost to attics and basements, and esoteric picks like “Mr. Russian, Please Don’t Shoot Down Santa’s Sleigh,” a Cold War-era number.

Which is not to be confused with “Can Santa Miss Those Missiles,” Solomon says.

Jon wants you to know that if you would like to make some requests, by all means get in touch.

» RSVP for this event on Facebook

At WPRB, we’ve never hidden our love for The Feelies – a band considered by some DJs in our ranks to be New Jersey’s finest export. Right up there on the top shelf with The Feelies are the band’s many side projects, groups like Yung Wu, The Trypes and tonight’s guests Wild Carnation.

Listen to 103.3 fm WPRB on Wednesday, September 23rd at 8:00 pm ET as Wild Carnation performs live on Jon Solomon’s show.

» Web Site
» MySpace

Here’s a live video of the song “Saab Story” from their most recent record “Superbus”:

Listen to 103.3 fm WPRB on Wednesday, September 16th at 8:00 pm ET as High Two recording artist Whales & Cops performs live on Jon Solomon’s show.

» Web Site

Here’s a video for their song “Futuro Futuro!” off of their debut ep “Great Bouncing Icebergs”:

Catch Whales & Cops live on Friday, September 18th at Pilam in Philadelphia with labelmates Make A Rising.

Come join WPRB and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia as we celebrate jazz pioneer SUN RA with live performances, lectures, films, and a record fair! These events are part of the ICA’s current exhibition, “Pathways to Unknown Known Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968,” which runs until August 2nd.

Full information about Sun Ra and the exhibition after the jump!

WED 07-01 @ 7PM: The Sun Ra Arkestra
Tickets are $10 General Admission, $5 for Students with a Valid ID, FREE for ICA Members

ICA is very pleased to present The Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen. The Sun Ra Arkestra continues to deliver some of the most potent, soul-grabbing jazz music ever written. With lyrics and song titles filled with mysticism, mythology, space travel, and other similarly cosmic trains of thought, the Arkestra’s freewheeling stage shows, complete with colorful costumes and uninhibited adventurism, perfectly embody the otherworldly proclivities of true jazz innovator Sun Ra.

WED 07-08 @ 7PM: John Szwed Lecture
FREE!

Hear a lecture by John Szwed, the biographic expert on all things Ra. He is an anthropologist, musicologist and historian who teaches at Columbia University and is the author of Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Da Capo Press, 1998).

SAT 07-11 @ 9AM-5PM: Philadelphia Record Fair 2009
$10 from 9-11AM, FREE from 11AM-close

A day of vinyl nirvana! ICA hosts the annual benefit for Vox Populi, Philadelphia’s acclaimed artist-run collective and gallery. Flip through bins. Find your treasure.

WED 07-15 @ 7PM: Outdoor Double Feature, curated by Jesse Pires (WPRB’s DJ Hi-Res!!!!)
Rain or shine. FREE!

Sun Ra: Brother from Another Planet (Dir. Don Letts, UK, 2005, video, 59 mins)
Don Letts, the legendary London DJ who introduced reggae and ska to a generation of punk rockers, delves into the mysterious world of Sun Ra in this British, made-for-television documentary. Sun Ra biographer John Szwed, musician Archie Shepp and member’s of Sun Ra’s Arkestra discuss the life and work of one of jazz music’s pre-eminent pioneers. For the uninitiated, Brother from Another Planet is a great introduction to Sun Ra, and for Ra devotees, it’s required viewing.

Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (Dir. Robert Mugge, USA, 1980, video, 61 mins)
Consisting of explosive live footage of the Sun Ra Arkestra and fascinating interviews with the man himself, A Joyful Noise is the complete Sun Ra experience. Filmed in and around Philadelphia and Washington D.C. when the Arkestra was living in Germantown, Robert Mugge’s documentary captures the group at the height of its creative powers. Each live performance featured in the film further illustrates the distinctive alchemy Sun Ra was able to create with his disciplined band. Ra makes his case for a better world through music, transcending banal, earthbound realities to produce a strange and fascinating aesthetic fusing ancient history with future visions.

WED 07-22 @ 7PM: King Britt & Rucyl, “Saturn Never Sleeps”
FREE!

“Saturn Never Sleeps” is a cosmic adventure in contemporary music. For this artist-curated event, Philadelphia DJ, composer and producer King Britt, in collaboration with multimedialist Rucyl, present a night of sonic and visual funk taking micro-edits of Sun-Ra source music and combining it with live experimentation together with video collage.

WED 07-29 @ 7PM: Sonic Liberation Front & Planet Y, curated by Ars Nova Workshop

Please join Ars Nova Workshop and ICA for two very special performances in conjunction with Pathways to Unknown Worlds. An expanded 12-member Sonic Liberation Front, the Philadelphia ensemble acclaimed for their iconoclastic combination of Free Jazz passion and Afro-Cuban percussion, will premiere “Jetway Confidential No.3 (for Sun Ra)”, a new composition dedicated to Sun Ra and commissioned specifically for this performance, and perform an arrangement of Sun Ra’s “Where Pathways Meet” from 1978’s Lanquidity recording, which featured saxophonist and SLF member Julian Pressley. This evening will also feature a very rare appearance from Planet Y – Buchla Music Easel master Charles Cohen and Stinking Lizaveta’s Yanni Papadopoulos, best described as “Subotnick meets Sun Ra meets Schnitzler.” (Aquarius Records) In addition, newly-unearthed archival films will be projected on the gallery walls.

Led by percussionist Kevin Diehl, a protégé of Free Jazz pioneer Sunny Murray, Sonic Liberation Front merges post-bop with traditional Afro-Cuban Yoruba roots music. While other ensembles have merged Bata drumming and jazz, none have done it with the vigor of SLF. The band members are true students of the Lukumi tradition under the guidance of percussionist/omo aña Chuckie Joseph, a lifelong Yoruba cultural scholar. It’s been said a million times that all music originates in West Africa ¬ and by returning the focus to its origins, SLF achieves a natural eclectism that serves as a fountain of ingenuity. Ancient to the future, indeed. For this special performance, an expanded 12-piece SLF performs featuring some of the most notable names in Philadelphia’s exploratory music scene including members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Make A Rising, and Shot x Shot.

Planet Y: Yanni Papadopoulos (dg-20 Casio digital guitar), Charles Cohen, (Buchla Music Easel)

Sonic Liberation Front: Todd Margasak (cornet), Terry Lawson (tenor saxophone/flute), Dan Scofield (alto saxophone), Julian Pressley (alto saxophone), Brent White (trombone), dmHotep (guitar), Travis Woodson (guitar), Matt Engle (double-bass), Chuck Joseph (Bata drums/drumkit), Shawn “Dade” Beckett (Bata drums/percussion), Khari Clemmons (Bata drums), Kevin Diehl (Bata drums/drumkit)

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Jazz pioneer, bandleader, mystic, philosopher, and consummate Afro-Futurist, Sun Ra, (born Herman Poole Blount 1914, Birmingham, Alabama, died 1993) and his personal mythology have grown increasingly relevant to a broad range of artists and communities. “Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968” presents a collection of paintings, drawings, prints, manuscripts, ephemera, and video produced by and about Ra and his associates–much of it previously unseen.

This exhibition, on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art April 24 – August 2, 2009 in the second floor gallery, examines how Ra and his dynamic, continually-evolving ensemble, the Philadelphia-based Arkestra, crafted both their otherworldly image and fiercely independent approach to self-production.

Highlights of the exhibition include original drawings for their 1960’s albums Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow and Other Planes of There, and five newly discovered typed and annotated broadsheets. Until recently, only one such broadsheet was known to exist – the one that Ra gave saxophonist John Coltrane in 1956. The show will also include the unpublished manuscript, The Magic Lie, a book of Ra’s poetry, which has become influential in the nascent Black Islamic movement. In addition to these documents, the film Spaceways, by Edward English, will be on view. The film documents Ra and his Arkestra (a deliberate re-spelling of “orchestra”), in 1968, as they prepare to perform at Carnegie Hall.

Early in his career, Sun Ra spent virtually all of his time and energy on Chicago’s south side, identifying with broader struggles for black power and identity, and saw his music as a key element in that struggle. As well as Sun Ra’s connection to the incipient grass-roots Afro-Futurist movement in Chicago, he also has a connection to Philadelphia. In 1968, Sun Ra brought the Arkestra to Philadelphia, where his band mate Marshall Allen inherited a house on Morton Street in Germantown. The house served as band headquarters until Sun Ra’s death in 1993. The Arkestra continues to perform under the leadership of Marshall Allen, who still resides at the Germantown house.

Long admired among fans of progressive jazz, Ra and his personal mythology have grown increasingly relevant and influential to a broad range of artists and communities. His music touched on the entire history of jazz, but he was also a pioneer of electronic and space music, and free improvisation.

Sun Ra developed a complicated persona of cosmic philosophies and lyrical poetry that made him a pioneer of Afro-futurism (a term coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future.”)

“Pathways to Unknown Worlds” is curated by John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terri Kapsalis for the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago and is coordinated at the ICA by Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow Stamatina Gregory. This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.

Fronted by Haley Fohr, Indiana’s Circuit Des Yeux are currently on tour in support of their new album, Symphone, which Volcanic Tongue’s David Keenan calls “a bunch of beautifully fractured tracks.” The album comes from “the same void that birthed Jandek, Jim Shepard, Adris Hoyos et al albeit cut with some almost Diadal-styled avant confusion.” Keenan goes on to write: “Imagine a solo songs LP by Jandek’s Nancy or Lisa Suckdog sung straight to cassette (w/ guitar / piano / keyboards / tape hiss accompaniment) and ‘produced’ by Majora’s ‘in-house’ team and you have the perfect recipe for a classically confusing late-night spin in the tradition of alla the best nada-info American privates.”

RSVP for this live performance on Facebook!

• Art around the clock (Michele Angermiller, Newark Star-Ledger)
• Annual marathon show for art lovers slated (Chris Sturgis, Times of Trenton)
• Review of The Van Pelt’s performance in Brooklyn (Ryan Muir, Brooklynvegan.com)

And of course, we’re psyched! Please don’t forget to stop by our tables/booths to say hello when you come out to support these fantastic events.