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Meet Rebecca Kilgore: A Wonderful Jazz Singer and Dedicated "Sleuth" of the American Pop Songbook

Aired on Friday, March 28th.

On this edition of ST, we're pleased to speak by phone with the terrific jazz singer Rebecca Kilgore, who'll be performing here in Tulsa tomorrow night (Saturday the 29th) in the Emerson Hall at All Souls Unitarian Church. The concert starts at 7pm; tickets (for $20 each) will be sold at the door. The Rebecca Kilgore Quartet --- formerly known (back when it was a trio) as BED, with Eddie Erickson (guitar/banjo/voice), Dan Barrett (trombone), and Joel Forbes (bass) --- will be preceded by Mischievous Swing, a local combo that specializes in acoustic jazz, Gypsy swing, Western swing, and other styles. Kilgore tells us about her band, her tireless if not never-ending passion for tracking down little-known American popular tunes from the Twenties and Thirties, and her somewhat belated decision --- back in the middle 1990s --- to start singing professionally. Ever since then, as her many fans know, she's been quite busy. Indeed, as noted at Kilgore's website: "Rebecca Kilgore has over 40 recordings in her discography. Some of her most notable are with Dave Frishberg on piano. She has also teamed with him on long-standing engagements in Portland, Oregon, where they both reside." Kilgore --- who's been on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, on A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor, and onstage with Michael Feinstein at Carnegie Hall --- also tells us about her latest album: "Just Imagine."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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