UMASS AMHERST

This edition of Jazz Beat presents an interview conducted by guest host Peter Sokolowski with Doc Severinsen, famous as Johnny Carson’s bandleader on The Tonight Show and a virtuoso trumpet player who still practices every day. This conversation took place before a live audience in the recital hall at UMASS Amherst, and covers subjects from Doc’s early career touring with big bands, his work as a studio musician in New York, and his television days.

In this episode, Allyson Morin speaks with NEPR Media Lab and Community Journalism students Kimberly Cruz and Milton Sagardia. Allyson and Milton discuss Milton's fear that budget cuts will end the Gear Up Program while Allyson and Kim explore how language barriers erode the mother-daughter relationship.

For birds, this time of year, it's all about the music.

But some birds have a different take on song. Rather than singers, they're percussionists.

Every spring, like clockwork, I wake up to an insistent, rhythmic sound. It's a woodpecker tapping a tree with its beak. It sounds to me like a big bird. But every time I gaze up, I can't find it.

Ornithologist Don Kroodsma, a retired UMass biology professor, says it's probably a Downy woodpecker, the smallest around here.  

Commentator Hannah Tran-Trinh graduated last week from UMass Amherst. She says she learned a lot there, but the best lessons were hard-won.

I grew up in Boston. My friends were quite the colorful bunch, but I never thought twice about the fact that we were a diverse group of kids. I just loved feeling comfortable. Being a part of something I felt I belonged to.

But then I showed up in western Mass. and it was the whitest place I'd ever seen.

Commentator and journalist Shaheen Pasha was a 19-year-old newsroom intern when a male colleague behaved in ways she felt crossed a line. As stories of sexual harassment in the media are surfacing more often these days, she's got some requests of her colleagues.

Graduation at UMass Amherst is less than two weeks a way. One senior, a public health major from Medford, wants to carry the Tibetan flag in a parade of flags, but the university says no.