ARTS
FASCINATIN’ RHYTHM
Michael Lasser, the longtime host of the nationally-syndicated radio program “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” will end the show on June 26. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE
WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING MORE? Signing off, Michael Lasser still hears that “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” BY JEFF SPEVAK
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@JEFFSPEVAK1
umming up 85 years of a man’s life — especially if he’s a bit of a Renaissance man — into a pithy phrase to be printed on the front of a T-shirt isn’t easy. But the one on the shirt Michael Lasser got from Ruth Phinney, his co-worker at Rochester’s WXXI classical radio station, nicely hits on a career milestone: “Ask me about my Peabody.” 48 CITY JUNE 2021
JSPEVAK@WXXI.ORG
“What I’ve always loved about it,” Lasser says, “is it sounds vaguely dirty.” Read into it what you want. Just as you may read what you want into so much of the music of the Great American Songbook, celebrated by Lasser for four decades on his nationally-syndicated weekly radio show, “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” for which he won a coveted George
Foster Peabody Award in 1994 and which he’s bringing to an end with a final broadcast on June 26. The award, which honors storytelling in broadcasting that reflects the social issues and emerging voices of our times, was a nod to something much deeper than the bouncy melody of “Surrey With the Fringe on Top.” In presenting Lasser with the recognition, jurors said his
program was a vivid example of what a listener described as “radio essays with songs used as illustrations.” “That’s how I’ve always thought of it,” Lasser says of that description of his show. The award “was about the way in which the commentary brought the songs alive. There’s an element of social history in those programs.” Broadcaster, teacher, theater critic, lecturer. Lasser is a writer as well. He has freelanced for CITY, written three books, has a fourth at the publisher, and is working on the fifth, “Lovely Day Tomorrow: The Lasting Appeal of the Great American Songbook.” All words about music that seems frozen in time. Yet change is a constant. Grief is a part of it. Lasser lost his wife, Elaine, 21 months ago. There is a sense of urgency now. Time must be used wisely. “One of the reasons I stopped doing the show was I didn’t want to work with a deadline anymore,” he says. “At 85, I think I’m entitled. But I also love these big projects, a book. I just have to learn to write faster. At my age.” The show — originally called “Anything Goes” — was first broadcast on WXXI in November 1980. At its peak, it was being carried by 35 to 40 stations nationwide. “At first it was much more focused on the Broadway musical,” Lasser says. “But over time, I broadened it to include the full range of the Great American Songbook, meaning commercial mainstream popular music, 1920 to 1950. Between the wars, essentially. And then I cheat, I go back to the first years when ragtime and jazz and the blues were shaping the music, and after 1950, when someone like Stephen Sondheim, who is certainly part of the songbook, is still working.” The songs are a soundtrack to the times. “Not only in the feel of the song, but in the content of the song,” Lasser says. “I distrust parceling out understanding of history, decade by decade. But it works here. The ’20s was the party after the war that will end all wars, and the party was going to last forever.” America partied on to “Ain’t She Sweet” and “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue.” But then came the ’30s, marked by the Great Depression and a march toward a second World War, and the songs got “smokier and darker,” Lasser says. By the ’40s, Lasser says, “the sense of loneliness and the longing in them is palpable.”
