About

About Afterglow

Afterglow is a weekly one-hour program of jazz and American popular song hosted by David Brent Johnson. Afterglow airs on WFIU HD1 every Friday at 10 p.m.

If your station is interested in carrying Afterglow, please contact us for details.

Program History

The origins of Afterglow are rather misty now, but dogged detective work based entirely on an offhand reply from creator Dick Bishop leads us to believe that the program debuted on WFIU sometime in the late 1970s
Dick took the title of the show and his theme from a Marian McPartland composition; all of the rest—the elegance, the passion, the laidback expertise, the congenial charm, and the delivery with a “martini moon” quality to it—came from Dick himself.

In addition to his considerable knowledge and love for the jazz and American popular song that he played every Friday evening, Dick also drew on his personal relationships and encounters with many of the performers that he featured.

Dick signed off on his last Afterglow program in January of 2005, turning the show over to David Brent Johnson, who also hosts WFIU’s Night Lights.

Support Afterglow

Afterglow is brought to you in part by the generous support of WFIU listeners and our corporate supporters. Please consider making a small contribution to help us keep bringing the program to you each week, or if you’d like to learn more about sponsorship opportunities, contact us.

Questions or Comments?

We love to hear from our listeners. If you have a question, comment or a suggestion for a future program please don’t hesitate to contact us and let us know what’s on your mind.

David Brent Johnson, Host

For the past five years David Brent Johnson has hosted WFIU’s nationally-syndicated historical jazz program Night Lights.

He has also guest-hosted for Joe Bourne on WFIU’s Just You and Me and The Big Bands, as well as producing WFIU documentaries about 1920s jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke and Duke Ellington’s 1941 civil-rights musical Jump for Joy. In 2006 he became the host of WFIU’s long-running, popular Friday-evening program Afterglow.

An Indianapolis native and IU alumnus, David began his radio career at Bloomington community radio station WFHB, where he hosted the weekly jazz program All That Jazz. A writer who’s published frequently in Bloom Magazine, The Ryder, the Bloomington Independent, and Indianapolis Nuvo, he has won two Society of Professional Journalists awards for his arts writing.

Music, literature, and history are long-held enthusiasms for Johnson, but he came to jazz only in his mid-twenties.

I had a handful of jazz LPs and a friend who was really immersed in the music,” he says, “but there was one day when I was sitting in a coffeehouse reading and heard a Count Basie song coming from the overhead speakers. It was my ‘light-on-the-road-to-Damascus’ moment. I also gave up smoking around that time, and all of my addictive energy and cigarette money went into buying jazz CDs instead.

Johnson lives with his wife in Bloomington’s Near-Westside neighborhood, a short walk from the gravesite of Hoagy Carmichael. He is currently working on a series about the history of Indiana jazz.

Other Afterglow Staff

• Michael Paskash, Audio Engineer
• LuAnn Johnson, Program Services Manager
• Cary Boyce, Program Production Manager
• Adam Schweigert, Online Manager
• Eoban Binder, Web Producer

WFIU Supporting Staff

• David Wood, Music Director
• Scott Witzke, Marketing Director:
• Josephine McRobbie, Resource/Educational Research Coordinator
• Nancy Krueger, Grants/Gifts Officer
• Marianne Woodruff, Corporate Support Director
• Christina Kuzmych, Executive Producer
• Perry Metz, Executive-in-Charge IU Radio-Television Services