Welcome to MikeL's website for Ken Wiley's The Art of Jazz show.

Ken Wiley ran the show "The Art of Jazz" in the Seattle/Tacoma area on KNKX (formerly KPLU) a jazz and blues based NPR station. The show began in Jul-1982, and ran until approx Jul-2021.

KNKX continued running the show as re-runs without mentioning the fact that these were re-runs, and 10-Dec-2023 they announced Ken's retirement, the final show being 17-Dec-2023.

Follows are some relevant articles I've found that mention Ken's show.

KNKX 12-Dec-23: Ken Wiley, longtime host of The Art of Jazz, retires after 40 years
KNKX 02-Jun-15: For Three Decades, Ken Wiley Has Talked About Others' Chops And Shown His Own
KNKX 24-Oct-21: The Great Excelsior Jazz Band & samples from Earshot Jazz Festival
KNKX 27-Feb-23: 2023 Golden Ear Awards Party presented by Earshot Jazz
KNKX 04-Jan-24: Introducing 'Tree of Jazz,' a new show from KNKX
KNKX 2016: Awards
KNKX 25-Dec-16: Jazz Northwest Holiday Show
Seattle Times 10-Jan-24: Ken Wiley, longtime host of KNKX's `Art of Jazz,' retires


[Jan-2024] Brief explanation of this website/archive.

I am just another Seattle area (contributing) listener of KNKX FM. I fell in love with Ken's show in the early 1990's. As I never seemed to have time to listen to it live (Sunday afternoons), I eventually set up my computer to automatically record it - strictly for time delay purposes so I could listen to it when I had time. Thus, I have recordings of it since 2004.

I've done my best to keep up with the technology changes, but there are occasional missing or incomplete shows, even just things like power outages occasionally lost a recording. I set it up as a podcast format, for my own convenience, some time around 2020. Please spend a few minutes and read the podcast history.

The reason I've decided to go public with this archive, is that although KNKX has stated the show will be available via their on-demand player, it is, but only sort-of. It chooses a random 1 hour chunk of a more recent show - you cannot even listen through a complete episode, let alone choose an episode.

So here's the Ken Wiley Art of Jazz podcast .rss page. Please note that this page is organized in reverse order -- newest on top, so as to make it easier for the returning visitor to access the latest. You'll also find a crude episode list at Text format episode list.

Note that the episodes from 2012-2013 will be available eventually, they were recorded, but are in .aac format and I haven't had the time to convert and upload them yet.


To listen to the Ken Wiley archive podcast, go into your podcast app, and subscribe to the following URL:

         https://podcast.vintners.net/kenwiley/kenwiley.rss

Please be warned that this is a very large archive (over 800 files, approx 100Gb) -- before subscribing you'll want to ensure that you are set to only download the first 10 episodes or some such.


Note that in July-2009 I created a Fan page for Ken Wiley's show on FaceBook. I did this specifically to prevent someone else from doing "cybersquatting". As far as I can tell, Ken never did email/facebook/etc. so my proactive stance turns out to have been moot.

[Apr-2018] There seems to be a KenWiley.com that is associated with a musician (jazz french horn player!) of this same name - that website is not related to the KNKX purveyor of The Art Of Jazz.

[Jan-2024] Note that KNKX has been playing re-runs of Ken's show since about July-2021 (although recent articles have said only since May-2023). It's possible that it's been entirely re-runs, and it's possible that it started before that, but I haven't had the time to keep going back and making notes of shows.

Copyright © 1997-2024 Vintners.Net (running on host bayanus)