Show Host Profile: Andrew Grafe

--Written by Melissa Milton

For two hours every Monday afternoon, WWOZ show host Andrew Grafe makes a mighty fine case for the many threads that weave together the music and people of New Orleans and those of the Delta region of neighboring Mississippi, home of the blues.

Isn’t it a big leap to connect traditional jazz, R&B, funk and all the other horn-driven, piano-based sounds of the Crescent City with a genre that revolves primarily around guitars and harmonicas? Not so much, according to the long-time host of Blues Eclectic.

Grafe explains, “I think it’s the universality of the themes, of overcoming struggle and being happy in the face of madness and existential dread. Joy in the face of madness, and apocalypse, and whatever fresh hell awaits. That’s why New Orleans is magical, because we live way closer to that reality than most places. You can’t compartmentalize here, death is omnipresent. Existential catastrophe, it’s always around all of us all the time. With that, you have a deeper understanding and appreciation of the ephemeral nature of life, and how short our time is. I think the blues speaks to that.”

Listening to Grafe talk about the music he loves, and the city he’s called home now for more than half his life, it’s very much the joy, not the fresh hell, that permeates his exuberant part of the conversation. As a teenager in Phoenix, mysteriously Grafe caught the New Orleans bug and decided, sight unseen, that he needed to live here. Thus was born a plan that propelled him here, first as a student at Loyola University. He discovered 90.7FM shortly thereafter.

In 1999, a 20-year-old Grafe marched into the station, then housed in Armstrong Park in a ramshackle building called The Tree House, and told Bill Berry, WWOZ show host and producer, that he wanted to be on the air. After the briefest of trainings - legendarily, one hour long - Grafe found himself called in to substitute on a Friday night, a “radio rookie” in his words. In no time, he was subbing frequently. After Katrina, as the station began re-assembling its regular schedule, Grafe inherited the Monday after blues slot, and he’s been there ever since.

“I’ve been doing this longer than anything else in my life!” Grafe laughs. “I think that, as someone who came to the station because I loved the station, and I love New Orleans music and all the genres that contribute to New Orleans music, I still think after 30 years of listening to OZ that it’s still a great station. At any given point during the week I can turn on the station and I’ll probably hear something that I’m really into, or that I haven’t heard before.”

In programming “Blues Eclectic,” Grafe takes to heart both of those words, stringing together classic and contemporary blues while occasionally wandering into other genres. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole, he admits, one that he loves sharing with his listeners.

“It was the age-old thing about a rock and roll kid backtracking and realizing that all this stuff comes from the blues, and the more I dug into that, it’s like this bottomless treasure trove. It all came from New Orleans, the antecedents to all of it. If you like history, and you like learning things, you can connect the threads and see the way this stuff all plays together. I try to carry that through in my show. I’m constantly thinking of it in the context of how to build a statement about American music and how these things are interrelated.”