Best Radio Show

A rare case of whimsy and eclecticism in radio programming. Hosted by Alisa Clancy on the jazz station KCSM, the show is nothing more than that old barstool exercise of choosing your desert-island music. Every week, a jazz type -- a musician, a producer, a promoter, a teacher -- selects and introduces eight pieces of music he would take to the island. The result is a fascinating hour of radio in which Led Zeppelin and the Police might be followed by Keith Jarrett and Beethoven, or Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins by Peggy Lee, or Boleroand Aaron Copland by Eric Burdon and War. Elsewhere on the dial, you're getting the new Counting Crows or your third Bob Seger song of the morning. Here, you're getting Thelonious Monk and Tom Waits -- in other words, the wonderfully scrambled DNA of jazz.