Music is the foundation for so many amazing aspects of life.

As GBH’s newly appointed Head of Music, Sam Brewer discusses music’s remarkable impact and how he started in the industry.  He also shares where to listen to live concerts around Boston after work for free, insight into GBH’s extraordinary studios, and the revolutionary ways GBH is connecting artists to viewers and listeners.

Sleepless Critic:  Just to clarify, GBH’s Head of Music primarily covers classical and jazz music?

Sam Brewer: Yes, it is the jazz and classical team.  GBH Music is a multi-platform production team housed inside GBH with twelve full time and almost as many part time employees.  Our biggest commitment and what everyone knows us for is CRB Classical 99.5 Boston.  CRB produces over 50 broadcasts a year and we have a live concert every single week from Symphony Hall or Tanglewood.  That includes concerts from the Boston Pops too.

We also program Jazz on 89.7 FM on the weekends and weekend overnights.  For the past five years, we’ve had a series of about eight GBH Music Presents concerts at the Fraser Performance Studio or Calderwood Studio here at GBH.  In person, streaming, and recorded performances are used on other platforms.  Obviously they stream and may end up as an In Concert production. 

Classical.org is the website for the radio station and a rich source of multimedia content about classical music, social media channels, and two newsletters which is one on jazz and one on classical and so much more.

From the GBH music perspective, we recently launched GBH Jazz Nights which are once a month performances at the GBH Studio at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square.  We’ve teamed up with JazzBoston to present jazz music the second Thursday of every month from 5:30 to 6:30 pm.  It’s a free event and we want to capture people after work to stop by for an hour or two and get a beer and listen to music.  It’s really to raise the profile of everything that we are doing in jazz.  For the past few years we have done these studio jazz shows about four a year and we are looking have four again in the spring.  We’ll have four in the spring to help us build up an audience, the excitement, and the anticipation for that and we feature a great lineup of performers.

Beyond December, we will be looking at a series of jazz performances at Fraser Performance Studio.  Fraser is gorgeous and really the jewel of the production facilities at GBH.  Antonio Oliart is our recording engineer on the GBH Music Team and he had a hand in designing the space and it’s his home along with Téa Mottolese who is our other recording engineer. 

Antonio recorded an album at Fraser with violinist Hilary Hahn which was just named the Gramophone record of the year.  It’s a huge honor and I think he’s won three or four Grammys from records he’s produced in that space.  We host a lot of these GBH jazz and classical music events at Fraser and you’re really sitting with maybe 90 or 100 people in a multi-camera shoot in an acoustically perfect music space. 

The Boston Symphony Chamber Players came and recorded this beautiful video show in Fraser and then we streamed.  It was in person and it will also become a radio broadcast in a week or two.  Somebody came up to me after the performance and told me they have known this musician their whole life and have never seen this person up close playing like this. 

SC:  Oh, I love those experiences. 

SB: That’s the real benefit of this space.  You get a sort of intimacy with the music that you don’t really get in any other venue in Boston because of the size and how it is structured.  It’s also how we host shows.  Brian McCreath, the host of the BSO broadcasts, hosted this program.  He’s a proxy for the audience and brings the audience into the stories behind the music in such a unique way. 

SC:  We know each other from the Boston Pops.   What piqued your interest from the Boston Pops to make the transition over to GBH?   I know it all starts with classical music. 

SB: That’s a great question.  I was a publicist at the BSO for about 10 years and started at the box office selling tickets.  I was just looking for the next step in my career and there’s such a crossover between the GBH audience and the Boston Symphony audience and in an effort to sort of promote other types of content and other stories, I was drawn to the work in public media and found a happy home for the last six years working quite closely with the newsroom here.  Of course the GBH Music team was my other main client here and pulled it back into the beauty, power and the rich, artistic life of classical music and jazz.  That’s how I found myself working even more closely with the GBH Music Team. 

SC:  You must also find yourself working with some famous musicians.  Which particular person stands out for you that you couldn’t believe you were working with them?

SB: There are countless people, but recently opera bass-baritone Davóne Tines.  We had someone scheduled for the Getting into Opera program and it was a wonderful event open to the public.  We are eventually going to turn it into a series for YouTube.  We’ve done two of these before and we have another one coming up.  We unfortunately lost the soprano who was scheduled to host this master class.  The concept here is people get into opera by seeing how great vocal performances are shaped.  So it’s a master class between a master teacher and a student. 

The star soprano who was supposed to lead the performance had to cancel about 36 hours before.  Davóne Tines came in and I had the opportunity to pick him up in a car and drive him over quickly before the performance was about to begin. 

I was blown away how even at the last minute, he wanted to reshape what we were doing to put the artists in the center and focus on them as humans and people before he got to hear them sing or work with them as a coach.  So, there are countless examples of artists I have met and been star struck or really moved by, but this one recently is just one of the benefits everyone on this team has which are these really close encounters with musicians as people and then get to share their stories with broader audiences.  It’s of interest to any type of consumer of any media, but I think music in particular because it can be abstract and one of things we specialize in is sharing an artist’s story behind the music. 

SC:  How do you think your prior experience has prepared you for what you are doing now?

SB: Two of the trends in my career have been music and communications and I think they will be thoroughly employed in this role.  Being so new to it, I can already tell one of the real joys of this role is working with all the people on this team.  I think anyone in a leadership position is responsible for supporting the team’s work. It is really exciting to come to work every day with people who are ready to pitch new and creative ideas and try to find ways for those little seeds of ideas to grow to support the work of a lot of creative professionals.  So, I suppose having a lot of experience as a communicator, in public relations, and then in public media has put me in a good position to help the team bring all this creativity to the forefront and to find things that resonate with audiences.  I’m excited to see how we can keep growing this incredible foundation here. 

SC:  Music is the connection to everything. 

SB: I agree with you.

SC:  Speaking of which, what is your favorite music and kinds of artists you like to listen to for GBH?

SB: I think from a very early age, I’ve always loved orchestral music.  I will just say broadly classical music encompassing classical, romantic, and baroque.  We play on CRB Classical 99.5 over 500 years of this incredible compendium of artistic styles.  It’s just so easy to get deeply lost in it and imagine your own stories. 

It’s funny because I have certainly listened to all sorts of music.  My wife and I went to the Weezer concert in Boston.  It was great fun, but I also had this experience where we were all the way up in the nosebleed section.  I don’t know what the capacity of TD Garden about 20,000 and it was a wonderful performance and I was thinking if I can just get one percent of these people to turn on CRB and find this intentional listening experience in the genres we promote, I think everyone would grow so tremendously.  A lot of what we program on this station is intentional to capture people who find a familiar sound in what we do and discover that they like classical music.  For example, Renaissance pieces that would be four minutes long and to someone who is just tuning in, it could sound like a folk song.  There could be an energy to Telemann perfect for driving down the road.  I’ve always loved orchestral music. The challenges and the fun of this role is to just to find people in this vast swath of people and find out who might want to come and join us and be part of this tribe. 

SC:  Classical is the foundation of so many other genres of music.  The epic Clair de Lune is a famous classical piece you know that you don’t know that you know.

SB: I agree with you and I think there is also a willingness that there wasn’t ten or fifteen years ago to cross between genres and like what they hear without knowing what the label is.  I just find there is a tremendous opportunity to turn more people into classical music and such growth potential there.   I’m glad we’re focused on that central part of it and our goal is just to spread that out and make people fall in love with it.

One of CRB’s next events will be the GBH Music Holiday Spectacular taking place at Calderwood Studio.  Be the first to learn about GBH’s upcoming music events through classical newsletter The Note and GBH’s Jazz newsletter.