On Jurgens

I notice, a month late, that Jurgen Gothe will leave DiscDrive in September. I listened to his show more or less daily in the 90s. In years since, unwilling to suffer the CBC’s shoddy internet streaming, I’ve listened to highly regarded classical/jazz/folk shows on KBPS, KING, BBC Radio 3 and several shortwave stations, but nothing there has even approached Gothe’s humble breadth, quiet precision, and sagacious ad-libs. The CBC site used to have clips of some of his notably bizarre riffs – reward for working links.

Gothe’s only match in that niche was on his own station, in Shelagh Rogers’ Take Five, which is already gone. English-language public radio’s response to the internet is so shambolic that there will probably never be another show comparable to them. I suppose I’ll still be bringing them up in fifty years. If we’re lucky, the archives will open one day.

Anyway, in spelunking on the Radio 2 site, I recalled the time when every week Take Five would wrap “Organ Thursday”, the only regular instrument-specific segment, presented by Jurgen Petrenko. He was an organist himself and did a good show, but it was hard not to wonder at the presence of a second Jurgen. One imagined that the CBC programming directors had a meeting in which someone pointed out that, relying heavily on Jurgen Gothe for the main drive-time show, they might be left catastrophically Jurgenless should he, the primary Jurgen, experience unexpected difficulties. In their wisdom, then, they were preparing for disaster by maintaining a secondary Jurgen as a backup, kept warm by its weekly presentation so that it could take over at a moment’s notice until the primary Jurgen was repaired and brought back online. Those guys thought of everything.