Dave Barber

Jerry Gillotti, owner of Gilly’s jazz club in downtown Dayton, passed away Thursday, November 23, 2017. He was 80 years old. 

Gillotti became a jazz fan while stationed in Germany during his service in the Army from 1956 to 1958.  Upon returning to Ohio, he graduated from the University of Dayton in 1962. He began presenting live music in 1969 when he opened his first business, Jerry Gillotti’s Wedgewood Inn on Patterson Road in Dayton.  In 1972, Gilly’s opened at 801 North Main Street. The club moved to its current location at 131 S. Jefferson Street in the heart of downtown Dayton in 1976.  

Gilly’s has hosted countless notable performers during the club’s 45 year tenure including Roy Meriwether who performed the club’s opening show, George Benson, B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Wynton Marsalis, Stan Getz, Stevie Ray Vaughan and many others.

Today on Rediscovered Radio, we meet the American poet Archibald MacLeish whose life spanned most of the 20th century. Bob Dylan described him as a man “who could take real people from history..and with the tender touch of a creator, deliver them right to your door.” Rediscovered Radio producer Dave Barber has the story of a MacLeish visit to Antioch College. Captured on tape, it is now part of the WYSO archives.

With 11 time zones and over 200 nationalities, Russia is the largest country in the world. Jazz drummer LaFrae Sci, who received her early musical training in her hometown of Dayton, got to know a region of Russia few tourists see when she took her band there.

The American jazz pianist Cecil Taylor is a pioneer of what is called free jazz—music which often discards notated scores and breaks with meter and conventional harmonic progression. Now 87, his first recordings were released in the 1950s. In the late 1960s and early 70s Taylor taught at Antioch College and recordings from his years in Yellow Springs are found in the WYSO archives.

In 1962 an Ohio State student, a singer and guitarist named Phil Ochs, moved to New York City and was soon at the center of the booming folk music scene in Greenwich Village which included Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary. Today Phil Ochs' music is less well known than some of his colleagues'—but it still delivers a powerful message.

The novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is a dense and complicated   beast of a book by any measure. Even serious readers never finish it.  Melville published it in 1851 and since then it’s been adapted and re-imagined by artists over and over.
 

In 1965, as increasing numbers of American troops were sent to Vietnam, and an American bombing campaign grew, public forums were organized on college campuses across the country. They were known as “teach-ins”   The idea was to study the war and the draft in depth.  In April of 1965, the Vietnam Colloquium, was held over three days on the Yellow Springs campus of Antioch College.

The kind of storytelling once only found in movie theatres is everywhere now —streamable at Amazon and Netflix, available at ITunes, and on television, too. Community Voices producer Dave Barber wondered how all this content is affecting the two art house cinemas in the region:The Little Art Theatre in Yellow Springs and the Neon in Dayton.

An Art House cinema is an independently run theatre that shows movies you don’t see everywhere - foreign films, documentaries, smaller films - often not produced by the big studios.

Rediscovered Radio returns to the Viet Nam war period – when a Yellow Springs resident, inspired by his Quaker beliefs, took part in a dramatic war protest. The Quaker community he was a part of continues a tradition of active pacifism.

Forty nine years ago this spring, the war in Viet Nam was escalating. Nearly half a million American troops were in South Viet Nam at the time, supporting the government in its war with the North.

Keigo Hirakawa is an Ivy League-educated researcher and professor at the University of Dayton. He is also a gifted jazz pianist—and he’s trying to be at the top of his game in both worlds. Hirakawa moved to Dayton from the east coast in 2010. He came here for the job at UD, but he also came here for the music.

“It’s hard to balance family, work and music,” Hirakawa says. “The amount of time that I spend for work—work meaning research—is non stop.”