Ken Nordine—Radio Icon and the Wizard of Word Jazz

Ken Nordine in his 80's was still a vital and creative force.

In our annual April National Poetry month series post we have featured young spoken word artists, including by happenstance two young women who had been refugees.  One of them uses all of the modern communications bells and whistles—social media and YouTube to spread her words with the speed of electrons around the world.  The other is a World Champion Slam poet who has come out of a world influenced by rap and the avante guard performance art scene.  Both, whether they know it or not owe a deep debt of gratitude to the marriage of Beat Generation coffee house performance, cool post-war jazz, and a Chicago radio guy with smooth golden pipes and the impeccable phrasing of an Ornette Coleman or Miles Davis.

Ken Nordine invented and perfected something called Word Jazz where sound disembodied from radio or recordings play inside the listeners mind.  He did it from the 1950s and almost to the end of his life on February 16, 2019 at age 98.  And all of it is still as fresh as any stuff out there.

Nordine was born in Cherokee, Iowa on April 13, 1920 but the family soon moved to Jazz Age Chicago.  His father was an architect who did work at the Century of Progress World’s Fair.  His extremely religious mother encouraged young Ken to ad lib sermons for her, early training for thinking and speaking quickly on his feet.  He attended Lane Tech on the North Side, one of the city’s elite high schools.

He went on to attend the University of Chicago where he founded the radio club spurred by his admiration for the work of Orson Welles, Norman Corwin, and Arch Obler.  He got a job running the Mimeograph and doing other odd jobs and clerical work on WBEZ, then an educational radio station serving Chicago Public Schools.  More importantly, his smooth, rich voice got him work in Chicago’s busy scene producing radio dramas, soap operas, sketch comedy, and situation comedies for local stations, network distribution, and syndication.  He worked as a voice actor and sometimes even as a host/presenter on anthology programs under several different names—Michael Scott, Ken Conrad, and Eric Lander among others.  Among the programs were The World’s Greatest Novels and Michel Scott Presents.

After graduation he wed Byryl with whom he would have a long and happy marriage which produced three sons.  The young couple moved around a lot at Nordine served the typical apprenticeship of a radio announcer, moving from station to station in small towns and increasingly larger markets.  There were stops in Bay City, Michigan, and West Palm Beach, Florida.  By the early ‘50s he was ensconced at WBBM, one of Chicago’s top stations and a CBS affiliate where he was a staff announcer.  

By mid-decade he was bored with just playing records on the late night show he hosted.  He was already occasionally reading poetry, short stories, or newspaper clippings.  He decided to add a jazz back drop to the readings and to punctuate the words, much like bongos and muted horns were being used in smoky coffee houses where poets read their stuff.  Initially most of the material was written by others but he mixed in unconventional sources—want ads, catalog listings, and other found material which elevated the sound of the words over their meaning.

Nordine recording an electric calculator.  Mundane sounds punctuated the riffs of Word Jazz

Nordine collaborated with a multi-instrumentalist studio musician.  They would discuss the presentation before the show.  He would make notes of what sounds and what instruments he wanted and where to drop them in.  He would add sound effects like dripping water, a clacking typewriter, or a revving engine.  The musician would add his suggestions.  Then they would go on the air.  They were loose enough so that they could improvise and jam together.

Eventually Nordine began mixing in his own words.  His pieces could be full of humor and whimsy or dark, foreboding, almost nightmarish.  On critic noted his work could be “more akin to Franz Kafka or Edgar Allan Poe” than to the Beats.  He called it simply Word Jazz.

People were fascinated by what he was doing and in 1957 Dot Records and inked a contract with him.  Nordine’s first LP Word Jazz featuring  cool jazz by the Fred Katz Group featuring Chico Hamilton recording under an alias due to contract restraints with Hamilton’s regular label.  The album was a cult hit and a strong catalog piece selling well year after year.  There were follow-up albums including Son of Word Jazz, Love Words, Next!, and Word Jam, Vol. II.

In the early '60's Nordine may have looked like a button down ad man, but something else entirely was going on in his mind.

Nordine and Hamilton brought the concept to television in 1960 on WNBQ (WMAQ-TV since 1965) Channel 5.  On a late night show called Faces in a Window Nordine sat on a stool illuminated with a single dim light on an otherwise darkened set and read poetry and his original material while the Fred Katz Group played.  Around the same time Fred Astaire danced to one of Nordine’s recordings, Now Baby on one of his TV specials.

Eventually Word Jazz became a stand-alone half hour program broadcast on WBBM-AM every Monday at Midnight.  That’s where I discovered and fell in love with Nordine and his work while I was a high school student in Skokie recently transplanted from Cheyenne.  His work influenced an original monologue I created for high school Forensics completions based on a Walter Mitty-esqe concept.  Although I initially won medals for the routine at speech meets, the officials of the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) found the piece too weird and disqualified it.  I was so proud.

In addition to his successful radio stints Nordine has always had a parallel and highly lucrative career as a freelance voice-over artist.  He has appeared in everything from industrial and school instructional films to commercials and movie trailers.  Eventually he convinced advertisers and advertising executives to allow him to create his own spots and campaigns for both radio and television.  Among his memorable campaigns were those for the Chicago Film Festival, First Chicago Bank, Levis, Magnavox, and Taster’s Choice.  He was also the voice and creator of the memorable Chicago Blackhawks “Cold steel on ice.”

 

Nordine's psychedelic TV spot for Levis became a cult favorite and is often included in film festivals of breakthrough shorts.

In the ‘80s he moved to National Public Radio which commissioned 65 programs.  Some NPR stations continue to run that original batch.  But Nordine continued to create and syndicate new programs which he made in his Chicago home studio employing the latest computer technology.  He continued to produce new records on a variety of labels including Grateful Dead.  Stare With Your Ears in 1979 was nominated for a spoken word Grammy.

In 2005 Nordine added a visual component to Word Jazz with a DVD featuring abstract computer animation, The Eye Is Never Filled.  He was a guest artist on many programs and recordings including on DJ Food’s eclectic electronic album The Search Engine in 2012.  

 Ken Nordine in his 90's was still hipper than all of  us.

Nordine was not too old to be hipper than all of us.

I can’t reproduce Nordine’s spoken word poetry on a page.  It doesn’t remotely work.  You have to hear it.  So here is a small collection of his pieces on YouTube.

First up, My Baby from the first Word Jazz album—the cut Fred Astaire danced to.  Then Coffee Won’t Hurt You and Flibberty Jib.

                                                                    You're My Baby.

 

                                                                            Coffee.

 

                                                                        Flibberty Jib.

 

Jack Kerouac Was the Beat Pilgrim on the Road

                                Jack Kerouac hanging out.

In 1957 Viking Press published a book that may be one of the most significant American cultural artifacts of the 20th Century—On the Road by Jack Kerouac.   It has been compared to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—a fresh look at America though entirely self-conscious eyes and presented in a revolutionary literary form.  It was hailed as “the Bible of the Beat Generation.”  But Truman Capote haughtily dismissed it—“That’s not writing, that's typing.”

Jack Kerouac was born to French Canadian parents in the old mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12, 1922.  The working class family spoke Joual, a rough dialect of Québécois Creole, at home and Ti Jean (Little John), as he was called, spoke no English until he was 6.  Later some of Kerouac’s first writing was done in Joual.

Ti Jean was very close to his mother, Gabrielle-Ange, a devout Catholic who imbued him in the faith.  Catholicism, particular its mystical side, would inform Kerouac’s writings even during his most intensely Buddhist period.  In his last years, living with and caring for his ill and aged mother, he returned to regular Catholic observance.

Kerouac first encountered New York on a trip to the city with his father Leo in 1935 at the age of 15 which would become the inspirations for his unpublished Joual novella Sur le Chemin (On the road), later translated as Old bull in the Bowery.  His connection to the city was visceral from the beginning.  When his skills as a high school football player earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and other prestigious schools, he opted for Columbia University because it was in the city.

Kerouac looked every inch the football player at Columbia until a broken leg and clash with his coarch ended his playing days and college career.

Both his football and academic careers were cut short when he broke his leg in freshman year and when his instinctive resistance to authority brought him into conflict with his coach, who kept him on the bench.  Kerouac dropped out after a year and drifted along, although he took some classes at the New School. While living on the West Side he encountered some of the circle of Bohemians he would make famous Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, and William S. Burroughs.

                               Kerouac in the Merchant Marine.

In 1942 Kerouac joined the Merchant Marine and thereafter often referred to himself as a sailor, although his career was brief.  The following year he enlisted in the Navy but went on sick call after little more than a week and was soon honorably discharged because of disability with a diagnosis of schizoid personality. 

Returning to New York, he drifted from job to job and settled into a life revolving around his friends.  Chief among them was Lucien Carr, the brilliant and handsome scion of an influential St. Louis family who introduced him to Ginsberg, Burroughs—another wealthy St. Louis native several years older than the rest of the group—and others.  Kerouac and Carr hoped to ship out to France together on a freighter and then somehow walk across the war torn country disguised as a French peasant (Kerouac) and a deaf mute (Carr) to be in Paris when the city was liberated by the allies.  They got as far as spending one night on a ship before being thrown off of the crew for some reason.

Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs.  The heart of Kerouac's social circle in New York was shattered when Carr murdered a stalker and involved him and Burroughs in a cover-up of the crime.

Carr had been stalked for years by a former teacher and friend of Burroughs, David Kammerer.  The infatuated man quit his job and moved to New York in an attempt to start a relationship.  Carr alternately ignored him or tolerated his presence on the fringe of their social circle.  One night after drinking Kammerer allegedly assaulted Carr in Central Park after the younger man again rebuffed his advances.  Carr stabbed him to death with his Boy Scout pocketknife, bound his hands and feet, and threw him in the river.  He went first to Burroughs and then to Kerouac for help.  Kerouac allegedly helped him dispose of some of the evidence.  But Carr eventually turned himself in and both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses in the case.  After a sensational trial with lurid suggestions of predatory homosexuality, Carr was found guilty of manslaughter and served two years in prison. 

Kerouac was guilt stricken and the social circle nearly shattered.  He would draw on the experience in two books, his well-reviewed but little read first novel The Town and the City published in 1950 and again in the last novel he published before his death, Vanity of Duluoz. 

He and Burroughs began collaboration in 1945 on a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which was published for the first time in its entirety in November 2008. 

Neil Cassady and Jack Kerouac.

In 1947 Ginsberg introduced Kerouac to Neal Cassady, a charismatic drifter and ex-con from California.  That same year the two set out on the adventures that Kerouac would chronicle in On the Road.

The book is thinly disguised autobiography.  The original manuscript, the legendary scroll—120 feet of thin tracing paper taped together and fed through Kerouac’s portable manual typewriter as he wrote in a frenzy of creativity in a few weeks of April 1951—contained the real names of the characters and a lot of detail—much of it sexual, that was left out of the published version for fear of obscenity laws.  The book described the bohemian circle of friends he had in New York, especially young Allen Ginsberg, and encountering the outlaw/saint/hero with whom he embarked on a series of cross country trips, separating and reuniting at intervals as the writer becomes increasingly alienated from the free spirited wander.  The trips began in 1947 and continued to early 1950.  All the while Kerouac kept a series of detailed notebooks on which based the manuscript.

Kerouac and the scroll manuscript of On the Road.

Over the next six years Kerouac revised the text of the scroll substantially, including changing the names of the characters transforming a memoir into a novel.  He became Sal Paradise, Cassady Dean Moriarty, and Ginsberg Carlo Marx.  So although the original manuscript reflected Kerouac’s passion for “spontaneous writing,” it had roots in the notebooks, from which large passages were lifted nearly intact, and was subject to considerable revision and editing. 

Kerouac’s first novel had been influenced by another stream of consciousness writer with a penchant for vivid descriptive passages—Thomas Wolfe and was a sprawling multi-generational epic.  On the Road was a major departure.  Kerouac consciously drew on the phrasing, rhythms, and riffing of bebop jazz for stylistic inspiration. 

Publishers were confused and put off.  Kerouac struggled for six years to find a publisher, re-editing his manuscript several times before Viking picked it up and scrubbed of much of the rawest sexual content.

When released, the book created a sensation—and sensational reviews.  The New York Times was almost over the top in effusive praise, “its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion.”  Most other reviews were equally enthusiastic, although the book found conservative critics for its portrayal of sex, drug use, and sympathetic treatment of Reds and minorities. 

And it gave a name to a restless, rebellious generation—The Beat Generation.  As much as chronicling them, it created them as the young of artistic bent across the country strove to become Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, and friends.  It continues to influence generations of writers, poets, musicians, artists of all kinds, and dreamy misfits.

Kerouac was uncomfortable with his new fame, although it created a market for some of his unpublished manuscripts including Visions of Cody, Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, and eventually Visions of Gerard created as he spent the next several years wandering America and Mexico. 

The Buddhist connection--Gary Snyder with Kerouac in California.

In California he came under the influence of the mystic nature poet Gary Snyder, with whom he lived and studied Buddhism, and which he recounted in Dharma Bums, his second most famous novel.  He continued to drink heavily, use drugs, and have intense failed relationships with women—he married three times but said his mother was the only woman he truly loved.  He would settle for a time in places from rural Minnesota to Orlando, Florida, to North Port, New York to write.  There were frequent extended visits with friends in the Beat scenes in New York and San Francisco.

After 1958 he lived mainly with his third wife, Stella Sampas and his ailing mother, who influenced his return to Catholicism.  His later works include Lonesome Traveler, Big Sur, and Vanity of Duluoz.

Unlike his friends Ginsburg, Burroughs, Snyder, Gregory Corso, and Cassady, who became an icon to a new generation as the driver of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters bus Further in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test, Kerouac did not embrace the counterculture of the Sixties who looked to him as inspiration.  Always more politically conservative than Ginsberg, who he dubbed Carlo Marx in On the Road, he became more so late in life.  He even became uncomfortable being identified with the Beat Generation he had named.  “I’m not a beatnik,” he declared, “I’m a Catholic.”

Kerouac died on October 21, 1969 at the age of 47 of internal bleeding caused by advanced cirrhosis of the liver.  He was living in St. Petersburg, Florida at the time with his wife and mother.  He was buried near his father back in Lowell, Massachusetts.   

Jack Kerouac—A Beat Pilgrim on the Road

Jack Kerouac hanging out.

In 1957 Viking Press published a book that may be one of the most significant American cultural artifacts of the 20th Century—On the Road by Jack Kerouac.   It has been compared to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—a fresh look at America though entirely self-conscious eyes and presented in a revolutionary literary form.  It was hailed as “the Bible of the Beat Generation.”  But Truman Capote haughtily dismissed it—“That’s not writing, that's typing.”

Jack Kerouac was born to French Canadian parents in the old mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12, 1922.  The working class family spoke Joual, a rough dialect of Québécois Creole, at home and Ti Jean (Little John), as he was called, spoke no English until he was 6.  Later some of Kerouac’s first writing was done in Joual.

Ti Jean was very close to his mother, Gabrielle-Ange, a devout Catholic who imbued him in the faith.  Catholicism, particular its mystical side, would inform Kerouac’s writings even during his most intensely Buddhist period.  In his last years, living with and caring for his ill and aged mother, he returned to regular Catholic observance.

Kerouac first encountered New York on a trip to the city with his father Leo in 1935 at the age of 15 which would become the inspirations for his unpublished Joual novella Sur le Chemin (On the road), later translated as Old bull in the Bowery.  His connection to the city was visceral from the beginning.  When his skills as a high school football player earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and other prestigious schools, he opted for Columbia University because it was in the city.

Kerouac looked every inch the football player at Columbia until a broken leg and clash with his coarch ended his playing days and college career.

Both his football and academic careers were cut short when he broke his leg freshman year and when his instinctive resistance to authority brought him into conflict with his coach, who kept him on the bench.  Kerouac dropped out after a year and drifted along, although he took some classes at the New School. While living on the West Side he encountered some of the circle of Bohemians he would make famous Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, and William S. Burroughs.

Kerouac in the Merchant Marine.

In 1942 Kerouac joined the Merchant Marine and thereafter often referred to himself as a sailor, although his career was brief.  The following year he enlisted in the Navy but went on sick call after little more than a week and was soon honorably discharged because of disability with a diagnosis of schizoid personality. 

Returning to New York, he drifted from job to job and settled into a life revolving around his friends.  Chief among them was Lucien Carr, the brilliant and handsome scion of an influential St. Louis family who introduced him to Ginsberg, Burroughs—another wealthy St. Louis native several years older than the rest of the group—and others.  Kerouac and Carr hoped to ship out to France together on a freighter and then somehow walk across the war torn country disguised as a French peasant (Kerouac) and a deaf mute (Carr) to be in Paris when the city was liberated by the allies.  They got as far as spending one night on a ship before being thrown off of the crew for some reason.

Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs.  The heart of Kerouac's social circle in New York was shattered when Carr murdered a stalker and involved he and Burroughs in a cover-up of the crime.

Carr had been stalked for years by a former teacher and friend of Burroughs, David Kammerer.  The infatuated man quit his job and moved to New York in an attempt to start a relationship.  Carr alternately ignored him or tolerated his presence on the fringe of their social circle.  One night after drinking Kammerer allegedly assaulted Carr in Central Park after the younger man again rebuffed his advances.  Carr stabbed him to death with his Boy Scout pocket knife, bound his hands and feet, and threw him in the river.  He went first to Burroughs and then to Kerouac for help.  Kerouac allegedly helped him dispose of some of the evidence.  But Carr eventually turned himself in and both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses in the case.  After a sensational trial with lurid suggestions of predatory homosexuality, Carr was found guilty of manslaughter and served two years in prison. 

Kerouac was guilt stricken and the social circle nearly shattered.  He would draw on the experience in two books, his well-reviewed but little read first novel The Town and the City published in 1950 and again in the last novel he published before his death, Vanity of Duluoz. 

He and Burroughs began collaboration in 1945 on a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which was published for the first time in its entirety in November 2008.  

Neil Cassady and Jack Kerrouac.

In 1947 Ginsberg introduced Kerouac to Neal Cassady, a charismatic drifter and ex-con from California.  That same year the two set out on the adventures that Kerouac would chronicle in On the Road.

The book is thinly disguised autobiography.  The original manuscript, the legendary scroll—120 feet of thin tracing paper taped together and fed through Kerouac’s portable manual typewriter as he wrote in a frenzy of creativity in a few weeks of April 1951—contained the real names of the characters and a lot of detail—much of it sexual, that was left out of the published version for fear of obscenity laws.  The book described the bohemian circle of friends he had in New York, especially young Allen Ginsberg, and encountering the outlaw/saint/hero with whom he embarked on a series of cross country trips, separating and reuniting at intervals as the writer becomes increasingly alienated from the free spirited wander.  The trips began in 1947 and continued to early 1950.  All the while Kerouac kept a series of detailed notebooks on which based the manuscript. 

Kerouac and the scroll manuscript of On the Road.

Over the next six years Kerouac revised the text of the scroll substantially, including changing the names of the characters transforming a memoir into a novel.  He became Sal Paradise, Cassady Dean Moriarty, and Ginsberg Carlo Marx.  So although the original manuscript reflected Kerouac’s passion for “spontaneous writing,” it had roots in the notebooks, from which large passages were lifted nearly intact, and was subject to considerable revision and editing. 

Kerouac’s first novel had been influenced by another stream of consciousness writer with a penchant for vivid descriptive passages—Thomas Wolfe and was a sprawling multi-generational epic.  On the Road was a major departure.  Kerouac consciously drew on the phrasing, rhythms, and riffing of bebop jazz for stylistic inspiration. 

Publishers were confused and put off.  Kerouac struggled for six years to find publisher, re-editing his manuscript several times before Viking picked it up and scrubbed of much of the rawest sexual content.

When released, the book created a sensation—and sensational reviews.  The New York Times Was almost over the top in effusive praise, “its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion.”  Most other reviews were equally enthusiastic, although the book found conservative critics for its portrayal of sex, drug use, and sympathetic treatment of Reds and minorities. 

And it gave a name to a restless, rebellious generation—The Beat Generation.  As much as chronicling them, it created them as the young of artistic bent across the country strove to become Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, and friends.  It continues to influence generations of writers, poets, musicians, artists of all kinds, and dreamy misfits.

Kerouac was uncomfortable with his new fame, although it created a market for some of his unpublished manuscripts including Visions of Cody, Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, and eventually Visions of Gerard created as he spent the next several years wandering America and Mexico. 

The Buddhist connection--Gary Snyder with Kerouac in California

In California he came under the influence of the mystic nature poet Gary Snyder, with whom he lived and studied Buddhism, and which he recounted in Dharma Bums, his second most famous novel.  He continued to drink heavily, use drugs, and have intense failed relationships with women—he married three times but said his mother was the only woman he truly loved.  He would settle for a time in places from rural Minnesota to Orlando, Florida, to North Port, New York to write.  There were frequent extended visits with friends in the Beat scenes in New York and San Francisco.

After 1958 he lived mainly with his third wife, Stella Sampas and his ailing mother, who influenced his return to Catholicism.  His later works include Lonesome Traveler, Big Sur, and Vanity of Duluoz.

Unlike his friends Ginsburg, Burroughs, Snyder, Gregory Corso, and Cassady, who became an icon to a new generation as the driver of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters bus Further in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test, Kerouac did not embrace the counter-culture of the Sixties who looked to him as inspiration.  Always more politically conservative that Ginsberg, who he dubbed Carlo Marx in On the Road, he became more so late in life.  He even became uncomfortable being identified with the Beat Generation he had named.  “I’m not a beatnik,” he declared, “I’m a Catholic.”

Kerouac died on October 21, 1969 at the age of 47 of internal bleeding caused by advanced cirrhosis of the liver.  He was living in St. Petersburg, Florida at the time with his wife and mother.  He was buried near his father back in Lowell, Massachusetts.   

Ken Nordine Wizard of Word Jazz Passes

Ken Nordine.

 

Note—Ken Nordine died Saturday at the age of 98. His unparalleled, smooth baritone guided WBEZ listeners through "Word Jazz" for more than 40 years. This post is adapted from one that originally ran during the National Poetry Month series in 2016.

And now, as they say, time for something completely different.  We have featured a couple of young spoken word artists, both by happenstance young women who had been refugees.  One uses all of the modern communications bells and whistles—social media and YouTube to spread her words with the speed of electrons around the world.  The other is a World Champion Slam poet who has come out of a world influenced by rap and the avante guard performance art scene.  Both, whether they know it or not owe a deep debt of gratitude to the marriage of Beat Generation coffee house performance, cool post-war jazz, and a Chicago Radio guy with smooth golden pipes and the impeccable phrasing of an Ornette Coleman or Miles Davis. 

Ken Nordine invented and perfected something called Word Jazz where sound disembodied from radio or recordings play inside the listeners mind.  He did it since the ‘50’s and almost to the end of his life today at it age 98.  And all of it is as fresh as the most  stuff out there.

Nordine was born in Cherokee, Iowa on April 13, 1920 but the family soon moved to jazz age Chicago.  His father was an architect who did work at the Century of Progress World’s Fair.  His extremely religious mother encouraged young Ken to ad lib sermons for her, early training for thinking and speaking quickly on his feet.  He attended Lane Tech on the North Side, one of the city’s elite high schools.

He went on to attend the University of Chicago where he founded the radio club spurred by his admiration for the work of Orson Welles, Norman Corwin, and Arch Obler.  He got a job running the Mimeograph and doing other odd jobs and clerical work on WBEZ, then an educational radio station serving Chicago Public Schools.  More importantly, his smooth, rich voice got him work in Chicago’s busy scene producing radio dramas, soap operas, sketch comedy, and situation comedies for local stations, network distribution, and syndication.  He worked as a voice actor and sometimes even as a host/presenter on anthology programs under several different names—Michael Scott, Ken Conrad, and Eric Lander among others.  Among the programs were The World’s Greatest Novels and Michel Scott Presents.

After graduation he wed Byryl with whom he would have a long and happy marriage which produced three sons.  The young couple moved around a lot at Nordine served the typical apprenticeship of a radio announcer, moving from station to station in small towns and increasingly larger markets.  There were stops in Bay City, Michigan, and West Palm Beach, Florida.  By the early ‘50’s he was ensconced at WBBM, one of Chicago’s top stations and a CBS affiliate where he was a staff announcer. 

By mid-decade he was bored with just playing records on the late night show he hosted.  He was already occasionally reading poetry, short stories, or newspaper clippings.  He decided to add a jazz back drop to the readings and to punctuate the words, much like bongos and muted horns were being used in smoky coffee houses where poets read their stuff.  Initially most of the material was written by others but he mixed in unconventional sources—want ads, catalog listing, and other found material which elevated the sound of the words over their meaning.

Nordine recording an electric calculatore.  Mundane sounds punctuated the riffs of Word Jazz

Nordine collaborated with a multi-instrumentalist studio musician.  They would discuss the presentation before the show.  He would make notes of what sounds and what instruments he wanted and where to drop them in.  He would add sound effects like dripping water, a clacking typewriter, or a revving engine.  The musician would add his suggestions.  Then they would go on the air.  They were loose enough so that they could improvise and jam together.

Eventually Nordine began mixing in his own words.  His pieces could be full of humor and whimsy or dark, foreboding, almost nightmarish.  On critic noted his work could be “more akin to Franz Kafka or Edgar Allan Poe” than to the Beats.  He called it simply Word Jazz.

People were fascinated by what he was doing and in 1957 Dot Records and inked a contract with him.  Nordine’s first LP Word Jazz featuring  cool jazz by the Fred Katz Group featuring Chico Hamilton recording under an alias due to contract restraints with Hamilton’s regular label.  The album was a cult hit and a strong catalog piece selling well year after year.  There were follow-up albums including Son of Word Jazz, Love Words, Next!, and Word Jam, Vol. II.

In the early '60's Nordine may have looked like a button down ad man, but something else entirely was going on in his mind.

Nordine and Hamilton brought the concept to Television in 1960 on WNBQ (WMAQ-TV since 1965) Channel 5.  On a late night show called Faces in a Window Nordine sat on a stool illuminated with a single dim light on an otherwise darkened set and read poetry and his original material while the Fred Katz Group played.  Around the same time Fred Astaire danced to one of Nordine’s recordings, Now Baby on one of his TV specials.

Eventually Word Jazz became a stand-alone half hour program broadcast on WBBM-AM every Monday at Midnight.  That’s where I discovered and fell in love with Nordine and his work while I was a high school student in Skokie recently transplanted from Cheyenne.  His work influenced an original monologue I created for Forensics completions based on a Walter Mitty-esqe concept.  Although I initially won medals for the routine at speech meets, the officials of the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) found the piece too weird and disqualified it.  I was so proud.

In addition to his successful radio stints Nordine has always had a parallel and highly lucrative parallel career as a free lance voice-over artist.  He has appeared in everything from industrial and school instructional films to commercials and movie trailers.  Eventually he convinced advertisers and advertising executives to allow him to create his own spots and campaigns for both radio and television.  Among his memorable campaigns were those for the Chicago Film Festival, First Chicago Bank, Levis, Magnavox, and Taster’s Choice.  He was also the voice and creator of the memorable Chicago Blackhawks “Cold steel on ice.”

Nordine's psycadelic TV spot for Levis became a cult favorite and is often included in film festivals of breakthrough shorts.

In the ‘80’ Word Jazz moved to National Public Radio which commission 65 programs.  Some NPR stations continue to run that original batch.  But Nordine continued to create and syndicate new programs which he made in his Chicago home studio employing the latest computer technology.  He continued to produce new records on a variety of labels including Grateful Dead.  Stare With Your Ears in 1979 was nominated for a spoken word Grammy.

In 2005 Nordine added a visual component to Word Jazz with a DVD featuring abstract computer animation, The Eye Is Never Filled.  He was a guest artist on many programs and recordings including on DJ Food’s eclectic electronic album The Search Engine in 2012.  

Ken Nordine in his 90's was still hipper than all of  us

Nordine was not too old to be hipper than all of us.

I can’t reproduce Nordine’s spoken word poetry on a page.  It doesn’t remotely work.  You have to hear it.  So here is a small collection of his pieces on YouTube.

First up, My Baby from the first Word Jazz album—the cut Fred Astaire danced to.  Then Coffee Won’t Hurt You and Flibberty Jib.