KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

An interview with Deena Rosenberg, author of “Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin” and Michael Strunsky, nephew of Ira Gershwin, recorded August 14, 1992, hosted by Richard Wolinsky with guest host Alex Davis.

In 1992, as part of the KPFA Morning Concert series, Richard Wolinsky interviewed both Deena Rosenberg and Michael Strunsky, co-hosted with San Francisco concert pianist Alex Davis, who prepared excerpts of Gershwin’s work for the show.

A full-scale radio documentary was planned following the program, and a handful of interviews recorded before the project was abandoned. One of those interviews, with Michael Strunsky’s father, English Strunsky, was aired for the first time on August 29, 2016, and the complete one-hour version was uploaded as a Radio Wolinsky podcast.

But the project began with this program, originally a live two-hour radio broadcast featuring songs and original recordings from the Gershwin archive. For copyright reasons, outside of short segments performed by Alex Davis, those recordings have been removed. Some of the dialogue has been tightened, but the result is what was heard from the KPFA studios that morning.

George Gershwin was born in 1898 and his brother Ira two years earlier. At the age of 15 he took a job as a song-plugger, playing other people’s songs on a piano for Remick Music Publisher for the sale of their sheet music. His first composed song was published when he was 17, and at 21 he scored his first big hit, Swanee. But it wasn’t until 1924 when he teamed up with his brother Ira as lyricist that George Gershwin became, what we might call a superstar, which he remained until his untimely death from a brain tumor in 1937. Ira Gershwin, who went on to work with other composers until he retired in the early 1960s, died in 1983.

Through a search, songs from the various shows mentioned in this interview, as well as individual songs, can be found on You Tube, in particular George Gershwin’s performance of Variations on I Got Rhythm from his radio broadcast, and Oscar Levant’s recording of the Second Rhapsody.

Digitized and remastered in 2018 by Richard Wolinsky.

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Sue Grafton died on December 28, 2017 at the age of seventy-seven. Best known as the author of a series of mysteries featuring the detective Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton was at the forefront of the Sisters in Crime movement — women authors who wrote crime fiction – starting with her first mystery, A is for Alibi in 1982, and continuing the alphabet through Y is for Yesterday. The final book in the series, Z is for Zero, was never written.

On April 17, 1989, on a book tour for F is for Fugitive, and again on April 13, 1992, for I Is for Innocent, Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff  spoke with Sue Grafton about the history of her career and her writing process. This program is taken from those two interviews.

Complete 1989 interview

Complete 1992 interview

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Helen Benedict, whose latest novel is “Wolf Season,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.

A journalist as well as novelist, Helen Benedict focuses on the effects of war, both on civilian and military populations. Her latest novel, “Wolf Season,” takes place in a small town near Albany, New York, where Iraq war veterans and Iraqi refugees both live and work, and what happens when a natural disaster forces them to interact. How does PTSD and trauma affect those who lived or fought in a war zone, and how does that trauma scar them afterward?

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Kate Jessica Raphael, whose lastest novel is “Murder Under the Fig Tree: A Palestine Mystery” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.

Activist and radio producer Kate Jessica Raphael discusses her latest novel “Murder Under the Fig Tree,” which deals with the gay and lesbian communities in Palestine and Israel, and features her two detectives from “Murder Under the Bridge,” a Palestinian detective and an American activist, both of whom join together to solve these murders.

In this wide-ranging interview, she discusses gay and lesbian life in the West Bank and Jerusalem, life in Israeli prisons, the American decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and other issues involving the Mideast, along with thoughts on how the mystery was created. Kate Jessica Raphael is a long-time producer and host at KPFA-FM and kpfa.org

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Jeffrey Eugenides, whose latest book is a collection of short stories, “Fresh Complaint,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.

Jeffrey Eugenides won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Middlesex.” In the following decade, he’s released one novel, “The Marriage Plot,” and “Fresh Complaint,” this new collection of stories. In this wide ranging interview he discusses some of the stories in the new book, as well as their relation to his own life, and touches on the creation of both the earlier two novels.

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