The New Zealand radio years
c. 1988–2004 completed Announcer, producer, production manager, host
Twenty years in New Zealand radio, from student station 95bFM to Radio Pacific, a 26-hour history of jazz, a hundred episodes of a children's serial, and a jazz show on a dance station.
Before the labs, the books and the professorship, there was radio: about twenty years of it, beginning in the late 1980s at Auckland’s student station 95bFM and running until the move to the United Kingdom in 2004.
The apprenticeship was at 95bFM; the trade was learned at the talkback station Radio Pacific, where Dubber worked for five years and rose to Production Manager before going independent in 1996. The independent years produced the work this archive keeps returning to: a twenty-six part, hour-per-episode documentary history of jazz, researched, written, produced, engineered and mixed by Dubber and narrated by Chris Parkinson; Off The Record, a Kiwi jazz interview show hosted by the veteran drummer Tony Hopkins, which seeded the Kiwi Jazz Tracks compilation on Tap Records; Ashley’s Worlds, an NZ On Air-funded children’s radio serial about an entirely ordinary housecat, one hundred episodes across two series, syndicated to some twenty stations; and Claybourne, the radio drama serial that refused to die.
Alongside the production work he spent around six years hosting It’s A Jazz Thing, a specialist jazz programme improbably housed on the Auckland dance station George FM, and taught the next generation as Degree Leader in Radio at Auckland University of Technology, before radio carried him to England, academia, and everything else in this archive. RNZ’s Mixtape interview, linked below, is a good hour of the whole story told in music.
Links
The Mixtape: Andrew Dubber (RNZ) ↗Calling Home: Andrew Dubber in Norrmjöle (RNZ) ↗
