Vintage Jones Aircheck: 30 September 2008 (WQJZ Ocean Pines, MD)

[spiritof67]

One of the earliest affiliates of the Smooth Jazz network I heard was WQJZ Ocean Pines, MD. The station served the 'Delmarva' region (DE, MD, VA) of the US. Unfortunately I wasn't fond of the sound quality and reliability of the internet sttream at the time (buffering, stream quality, etc), and learned about other affiliates that streamed the network, such as KZSP and WDRR.

Many internet streams in 2001 were turned off for copyright and AFTRA reasons, and WQJZ was one of them. They didn't return to the web for several years afterwards. By that point I found other streams that carried the Jones network and listened to them on a regular basis.

I did record WQJZ on the last day of the Jones Network, which was on 30 September 2008. There is over four hours here, and it is divided into five sections. The files are 192/44.1 and can be found at this link:

http://www.4shared.com/folder/0EeB3Pse/WQJZ.html

This is the first time I have uploaded files from this affiliate. An earlier poster many years ago ('smoothguy') had audio from WQJZ from around this time and back from 1999 as well. They too are worth a download if you don't already have them.

 

[crainbebo]

Was a very dark day for smooth jazz. Thanks for the upload. It was very odd for the remaining Jones affiliates to have John Evans telling us it's "12 past the hour" for the last time, replacing with that crappy BA Ramsey Lewis stuff the next day...or even that afternoon. By late afternoon 9/30, WQJZ had flipped to BA's Dave Koz afternoon show, full of Motown, Motown sax covers and Kenny G crap.
I did notice that WQJZ had a stream very early as well...early-mid 2000 up to 2001. "BroadcastAmerica.com" provided the stream, and I was kind of surprised to hear that you had lots of problems with it.

-crainbebo

 

[spiritof67]

I forgot about Broadcast America's involvement in WQJZ's stream. Another affiliate that used Broadcast America was KSKX (105.5 MHz), which covered Colorado Springs. In a much earlier time (under the same ownership), they were an affiliate of The Breeze network as well. I did not roll tape on KSKX unfortunately, and it may have been for similar reasons. In that case, KSKX had a stream that had lesser quality audio than other affiliates I found later.

Yes, September 30'th was a sad day. On the plus side, there was a fair amount of notice given before the network ended. For that, I'll give them credit.