He talks to our wives in our bedrooms. He speaks to them softly, slipping them the powerful pill of music. He knows they are listening to him, this Bohemian-voiced night fly with the nursery-rhyme last name. He knows there's nothing innocent about jazz. It will break your heart, steal your woman, then buy you a Scotch.
"He's as good as anybody I've heard in this country doing jazz," says Baltimore talk show host Marc Steiner.
He is Andy Bienstock. The shy cat in a fedora has been at WJHU-FM (88.1) since it was 10-watt student station and Bienstock, a Johns Hopkins political science major, dropped by for a job that has lasted 13 years. At 37 (only), he's the station's veteran -- a New Yorker with a Yankees photo montage on his desk next to pinups of his main man, Frank Sinatra.
Bienstock's jazz show is an island of local music in the station's sea of public affairs and news. From 8: 30 p.m. to midnight (9: 30-midnight on Mondays), Bienstock swivels in WJHU's control room and sees himself in the reflection of the studio's glass. What does he see? A melancholy man alone with his moods and with a disembodied audience of one or one thousand? He's playing music for someone out there. This is a fun gig, but it's also a perpetual audition.
"It's a cool job. I don't disagree," he says. "But you want to come off well. You don't want to be a weenie or a jerk."
Nights at WJHU, it's just Bienstock, his phantasmic reflection, a coffee pot (he takes his java black), a messy music library (his doing), the air conditioning (which can make odd noises at night) and enough stamina to cruise uneventfully until midnight -- barring any thunderstorm that might knock the air out of the public station.
Like the jazz he exposes, Bienstock's program is improvisation. He's never more than one song ahead of himself. As he listens to one song, he plots the follow-up. They must make a fun, sensible couple; maybe Carmen McRae followed by Sarah Vaughan in a seamless segue leading Bienstock to the top of the hour and news from National Public Radio.
There are no play lists. No memos from bosses to pretend to follow. Bienstock plays what he feels like playing. "I make it up as I go along." What his mood calls for. "Days and nights have moods, and I don't think it's just me," Bienstock says.
"If you get really lucky," he says, "you catch the mood of the night."
Shadows and light
