Ken Zahnle
Music DirectorKen oversees all music programming for Tri States Public Radio, hosting the morning classical music program Ovation, the Saturday nigh jazz survey After Hours, and engineering recorded performances for TSPR. Ken is a native of Highland Park, IL, with degrees in music and broadcasting from Western Illinois University. Teenage years listening to Chicago's old-school fine arts and classical radio stations, coupled with a few months spinning discs on a college residence hall radio station, led him onto the primrose career path of radio. Ken has deep roots at TSPR, starting as a student staff announcer and host, before becoming news director for a group of local radio stations, then Program Director for Tri States Audio Information Services. When he's not deep within our studios and music library, he continues his over quarter-century of assisting Macomb High School's Marching Band.
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Thank You for helping make February Classically… Black! -
James Lee III was born in 1975 in St. Joseph, Michigan, and began studying piano at what he considers a late age…12… when his father signed him up for lessons without his knowledge
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It’s time to meet Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the Year.A child of the 1970’s, Valerie Coleman hails from the traditionally black West End neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky.
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Wynton Marsalis is the most famed member of a New Orleans musical dynasty. Born in 1961 to prominent jazz pianist and teacher Ellis Marsalis, he was named for another jazz great, pianist Wynton Kelly, and he got his first trumpet at age 6 from another famed trumpeter, Al Hirt.
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Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was fated to write music. He was born in 1932 and raised in Manhattan, the child of a mother active in the arts as a piano teacher, church organist, and director of a theater company… who named her son after the great African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
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Born in Chicago in 1913 to an activist family, Margaret Bonds began her studies with the best of Bronzeville… composers Florence Beatrice Price and William Levi Dawson.
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Fela Sowande was born outside Lagos, Nigeria in 1905, the son of an Anglican Priest. Growing up a choirboy, he was taken under the wing of Nigerian church music pioneer Dr. T.K Ekundayo Philips, learning Bach and other European composers on the organ, as well as new native Yoruba works being introduced into the church service.
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Edward Kennedy Ellington was born and raised in Washington D.C.’s West End neighborhood.
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William Levi Dawson ran away from home in 1912 to study music at the Tuskegee Institute. Working through school as a music librarian… and a laborer on the Agriculture Department farm… he was a member of the Institute’s band and orchestra, as well as composing and touring with the Tuskegee Singers.
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James P. Johnson grew up in New York City listening to the rags of Scott Joplin and studying classical piano and theory with an Italian teacher.
