Welcome to the first installment of Sights Unheard, a column by Robert Ham highlighting the best music-centric TV shows of all time. This week, we kick things off by looking at Night Music.
Like all music junkies living in small towns in 1990 without a driver’s license, my ability to hear new sounds was limited to the media of the time: the mix tapes my older, more enlightened brother would make for me, terrestrial radio and the idiot box.
Luckily, this was an era where television stuffed as many music-based shows as possible into its broadcasting schedules in an effort to keep up with the cultural juggernaut known as MTV. My options were surprisingly varied; as a music-hungry youth, I wanted to absorb as much of it as my brain and body could handle.
So it was that one lazy summer afternoon when I had exhausted all the other entertainment at my disposal and decided to sprawl on our brownish living room carpet for a bit of channel surfing that I stumbled upon a revelation: a show called Night Music.
I expected the worst considering the host was schmaltz sax player David Sanborn, but sat upright when he introduced my favorite band of the moment, the Pixies, who tore through visceral performances of “Tame” and “Monkey Gone To Heaven.” But what came next hit me like a train.
It was a gang of African-American men and women, all dressed in bright, multi-colored robes. The rhythm section locked into a loose swing beat, and everyone was chanting, “You’ve got to face the music/you’ve got to listen to the cosmos song.” All well and good, but then their lanky sax player ripped into a solo that sounded like a cat undergoing electroshock therapy. I recognized it as jazz, but my Miles Davis and Duke Ellington cassettes did not prepare me for this.
The band was, of course, Sun Ra and his Arkestra, and here they were on a free TV station, picked up via antenna, blowing my college rock-loving mind on a weekend afternoon. And Night Music just went on from there, as if moving from cosmic jazz to performances by neo-folkster Syd Straw, dancehall reggae singer Sister Carol and R&B legend Al Green was the most normal thing in the world.
To the folks behind the show, this is what made sense. They were catholic in their musical taste and wanted to make radical connections that no one would see coming in the guise of a late night variety show.
Now, 25 years after its first appearance on NBC’s schedule, Night Music is still the standard-bearer for presentations of eclectic live performances and unusual jam sessions. Its 40 episodes presaged multi-varied TV programs like Later…With Jools Holland (the former Squeeze keyboardist was actually a co-host on Night Music’s first season) and the off-kilter collaborations Perry Farrell tried to foment at early Lollapaloozas.
Yet the reason that a show like Night Music only survived for two seasons while Later… rages on into its 44th is that the former took far more chances than the latter. The core group of producers and music supervisors—Sanborn, Holland, David Saltz, Hal Willner, and Joe Boyd—wanted simply to highlight the artists that they enjoyed. As Sanborn told Nashville Scene’s Andrew Clayman in a piece on the show last year, “We’d go down our wish list of musicians and try to put together what we thought was an interesting show—an interesting mix of people.”