West Hartford Jazz Hero
As jazz music director at Connecticut’s WWUH, licensed to the University of Hartford, Chuck Obuchowski for the past 25 years has presided over a station that has been the heartbeat of jazz in the Greater Hartford area. Along with hosting the morning show “Out Here and Beyond” (note the veiled reference to Eric Dolphy’s Out There, a personal favorite), his mission at the station remains the dissemination of the music he discovered and fell in love with during the late ’70s as a student at Syracuse University.
“I love jazz,” says the Manchester resident. “I live the music, so I do my best to present it in a respectable way but also in a way that people will enjoy. So it’s a labor of love. I know that’s cliché, but it really is.”
While the station captures the diversity of the modern jazz realm, on his own morning show Obuchowski has long championed local jazz artists while also conducting on-air interviews with national and internationally known jazz musicians. He’s a Jazz Hero who knows that a living tradition requires a constant flow of new creation. “I devote a major portion of every program to new releases, with an emphasis on independent artists and those musicians who allow their creative impulses free rein,” he says.
Obuchowski began contributing record reviews to The Daily Orange at Syracuse University while also writing a jazz column called Syncopations for the alternative weekly The National Rag. While at Syracuse he also attended concerts by the likes of Henry Threadgill, Jay Hoggard, and Muhal Richard Abrams.
After college, he attended numerous concerts at Real Art Ways in Hartford by the likes of David Murray, Anthony Braxton, Don Pullen, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Julius Hemphill. He did his first radio work in 1987 at WHUS from the main campus of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where he conducted an on-air interview with composer George Russell.
Obuchowski joined the staff at WWUH in West Hartford in 1993 and did his first show at the station in May of 1994. Now celebrating his 25th anniversary there as Jazz Music Director, he remains committed to the fringe on his morning “Out Here and Beyond” show. “I just love the music,” he says. “And I want to see the music thrive.”
Listen to the WWUH stream: https://www.wwuh.org/0043-listen-online.
— Bill Milkowski
