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Rapp on Jazz
All Stations: Mon-Fri, 6:19 am, 8:19 am, and 1:39 pm | April 2023

Rapp on Jazz, co-produced by South Carolina Public Radio and the ColaJazz Foundation, highlights the Palmetto State's connection to the history of jazz music and the current jazz scene. Join Mark Rapp, executive director of the foundation and host of SC Public Radio’s ColaJazz Presents, for these 60-second segments covering everything from famous South Carolinians like Dizzy Gillespie and Eartha Kitt to the “Big Apple” dance craze of the 1930s to the best clubs to experience jazz in the state.

Latest Episodes
  • If there is a signature dance of the Jazz Age of the 1920s, it is the Charleston.
  • Little is known about tuba player Pete Briggs, one of the earliest musicians from South Carolina to make a name for themselves.
  • Earnest Evans, born in the Spring Gully community of Georgetown, SC, is better known by his equally alliterative stage name: Chubby Checker.
  • Singer and guitarist Freddie 'Pepper' Green was born in Charleston, SC in 1911.
  • The Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes considered Charleston-born jazz and blues vocalist Bertha "Chippie" Hill to be one of the 12 greatest African American folk singers.
  • Trumpeter, impresario, writer, and jazz advocate and historian, Jack McCray, was a native of Charleston, SC.
  • Houston Person, the tenor sax master, was born in 1934 in Florence, SC.
  • A disabled Gullah beggar riding through old Charleston, SC, on a goat-drawn cart tries to save a beautiful and troubled young woman from thugs and pushers. That might sound like a strange idea for an opera, but that is the plot of "Porgy and Bess," perhaps the greatest American opera written.
  • Bebop jazz trumpeter and composer Pete Minger was born George Allen Minger on January 22, 1953 in Orangeburg, SC.
  • If you were lucky enough to attending the Main Street Jazz Festival in Columbia, SC, in the early 1990s, you likely heard a young Christ Potter blow you away on the saxophone.