Like many native Atlantans, jazz pianist Joe Alterman has been listening to H. Johnson’s jazz show on WABE for years.
“The most exciting thing to me about getting my driver’s license when I was 16, was the fact that I could go somewhere on a Saturday night, and then leave that place and drive around listening to H,” Alterman said. “He turned me on to so much music that has changed my life.”
Now, Alterman has the opportunity to do the same thing. On July 12, the first episode of Atlerman’s new radio show “The Upside of Jazz” will premiere on WABE. The show will play on Saturday evenings at 7 p.m.
Alterman started piano lessons at age four (he didn’t love it at first – he kept getting in trouble for changing the notes). But while he didn’t immediately take to the piano, he loved going to bluegrass shows with his dad. He got turned onto jazz music – and back onto the piano – by hearing jazz musicians take popular songs and make them their own.
“Oscar Peterson, if he played a song like ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ that I heard at a bluegrass festival – the way in which he played the melody and interpreted it would be so cool,” Alterman said. “It just kind of opened my eyes to this whole interpreting songs thing.”
Decades later, Alterman has a wealth of jazz knowledge he’s ready to share with his hometown. Each episode of “The Upside of Jazz” will feature music and storytelling centering around a weekly theme.
Alterman will talk about his favorite tracks and talk to artists about theirs, as well as discuss his musical journey. He is particularly looking forward to sharing music and information about his mentors, Les McCann, Ramsey Lewis, and Ahmad Jamal.
“I’ve been really lucky to get to know a lot of the legends and learn from them,” Alterman said. “One of the reasons I want to share all that is because I feel like you often hear the term, ‘Music is life.’ I never knew what that meant. I feel like a lot of the things that I’ve learned from these great musicians are things you can carry into your life.”
Alterman is aware that jazz doesn’t necessarily have the cultural cache that it once did in the 20th century. Through “The Upside of Jazz,” he hopes to help make jazz more accessible to a wider audience.
“A lot of people have a negative, preconceived notion when they hear the word jazz,” he said. “What happens to me a lot – and this happened to my mentors in the 60s too – is that so many times, people will come to our gigs and say, ‘I don’t like jazz, but I like that.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, that is jazz!’”
Alterman said that he feels like people tend to shy away from jazz because they feel like they don’t know enough about the genre to really enjoy it. But it’s just like any other genre, he said. The same things that people might go wild for at a rock show – a drum fill, a guitar solo – are the exact same things that excite people at a jazz show.
“In other genres of music, people can immediately connect to the moments that make jazz really special, that makes all music really special,” Alterman said. “But there’s a distance from it [in jazz].”
Alterman said that watching someone like H. Johnson teach Atlanta about jazz for all these years has taught him a lot about how to approach his own show.
“Watching how he would present someone like John Coltrane, whose music really ranges from traditional to very avant garde – I learned what resonates with the general audience by watching how he would present audiences artists like that,” Alterman said.
The name of the show comes from a song Alterman wrote during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic called “The Upside of Down.” The emotional core of that song reminded him of a quote from jazz saxophonist Johnny Griffin: “Jazz is music made by and for people who choose to feel good in spite of conditions.”
“To me, that’s what it is,” Alterman said.