John Diliberto
John Diliberto is a nationally published writer and award-winning radio producer who has been exploring and exposing new music on the radio, in print and on-line since 1974. He currently is the host and executive producer of Echoes, a nightly music soundscape on Public Radio International, and heard on public radio stations across the country.
John grew up in Massachusetts. A child of the British invasion, the first music John embraced was by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Kinks and The Zombies. In junior high school, John had two passions: Marvel comics and “underground” rock. His first concert was the Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Soft Machine and The Eire Apparent at the Framingham Music Tent in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1968. Inspired by Jethro Tull and The Blues Project, John began playing flute in 9th grade, but he had to give up his lessons because the marching band conflicted with football. But he kept playing on his own.Football got him a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he was a DJ on the university-owned public radio station WXPN. In 1975-6 he created Star's End, an ambient radio show that is still on the air.
John was a member of a short-lived band known as The Spontaneous Creation Space Music Ensemble. He described it as "A jam band put together by DJs on the airwaves of WXPN in the 1970s."[1]
Upon leaving Penn in 1976, John worked in various record stores while starting to write for the local alternative paper The Drummer. His editor was David Fricke, who has written and edited for Rolling Stone. In 1979 he began writing reviews for Audio magazine. A sidetrack in 1980 took him to Berkeley California where he was Program Director of KALX, the university station there.
In 1981 John returned to Philadelphia where he continued hosting shows at WXPN. That same year, he began producing programs for national distribution. The first was a five part series on the electronic underground called Electronic Minstrels. These half hour documentaries included David Borden, Helen Thorington, Woz (not THAT Woz), The Ghostwriters and Michael William Gilbert.
Then came Totally Wired, a weekly documentary focusing on artists working at the cutting edges of music. Some of the highlights included location interviews with John Cage, Brian Eno, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tangerine Dream, Kate Bush, Klaus Schulze, Robert Fripp, Keith Jarrett, Vangelis, Wendy Carlos and Steve Roach. In all, 122 Totally Wired episodes were produced from 1982-1989. It won The Major Armstrong Award, The Ohio State Award, and the National Federation of Community Broadcasters Golden Reel Award. Totally Wired ended when Echoes began in October, 1989. On Echoes, John is the executive producer and host. He oversees the selection of music on the program, conducts, produces and writes most of the interview features.
Many of John’s interviews can also be found in magazine form. He’s a nationally published music journalist whose reviews and features have appeared in Musician, Billboard, Downbeat, Jazziz, Pulse, Audio, CD Review, Music Technology, Electronic Musician, Mix, and other publications.
In the late 90s and into the new millennium John produced 12 documentaries for NPR’s Jazz Profiles, including a two-part program on John Coltrane that was part of the Jazz Profiles Peabody Award Winning submission in 2001.
John has also worked on a several albums. Besides the Echoes Living Room Concerts CDs, he compiled and wrote liner notes for MBNT: A Recollection of Proto-ambient Music from Hearts of Space (Hearts of Space), wrote liner notes for A Quiet Revolution: 30 Years of Windham Hill, The Big Bang (Ellipsis Arts), Musique Mechanique (Celestial Harmonies), Shadows and Light (Deutsche Gramophone), Planet Soup (Ellipsis Arts), and Sun Ra’s Lanquidity (Evidence) and Afro Celt Sound System’s Capture: 1995-2010 (Realworld).
John lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
References
- Profile of John Diliberto at Echoes.org. Retrieved on 2009-03-02.