The Music Man
The Music Man
Dave Benson (aka Ben Sonic) runs three internet radio stations out of his Bloomfield home
What does a lifelong radio guy do when he retires after 40 years in the business? Answer: he starts a radio station! Or two. Or three.
At least that was Dave Benson’s reaction to retirement. He now runs three internet radio stations—TheJazzStation, BenSonic, and The Odd Sunday.
“I started playing records for people literally at the dances after the basketball game, and I ended up doing it for my entire life. So it’s fairly logical that when I stopped working in radio, I’d just turn around and start playing music for people again,” he said.
In his long radio career, Benson was an announcer, a music director and eventually a program director and manager.
“I was in the radio business from the time I was 19, and I did it for 40 some years,” he said. “I programmed KFOG for 10 years. I was a consultant for the KRUSH here in Santa Rosa. I worked in Chicago and Denver and Seattle, and I had a kind of a typical radio life. I spent a lot of time in different towns.”
He also worked as a tour manager for reknowned jazz guitarist Pat Matheny.
All that Jazz
Benson started The Jazz Station three years ago after he retired (a word he hates).
“I got out of the corporate radio business, and I was very curious about internet streaming. I had always wanted to create a jazz station. Then COVID hit, and I don’t do jigsaw puzzles.”
Why a jazz station?
“A lot of reasons: I wanted something to listen to for one thing,” Benson said. “I wanted to use my music collection in a way that I had access to it all the time, and so I built The Jazz Station. I started it to use as a demo for the SFJazz people—I was trying to convince them that they should have a radio station.”
That never got off the ground, but The Jazz Station did. Benson said The Jazz Station offers a mix of jazz styles.
“Jazz has a lot of different subcultures, and I consider myself sort of a centrist. I’m young enough (which isn’t a phrase I get to use much) but young enough that the electric Miles Davis was some of the earliest jazz that I heard and was interested in. I was a jazz fan from the time I was in high school.”
Over the ensuing years, he did a deep dive into the genre.
“You know, jazz is — and I think this is why jazz sometimes has a smaller audience—but you almost have to, not study it, but you’d have to have a deeper interest than just “La la la. Let’s turn on some music.” To really appreciate it, it requires a little more commitment and, as I say, you have to listen with intention.”
“You know, jazz and wine, I think is a good analogy. You can just drink wine, but if you spend just a little bit of time paying a little bit of attention to where the grapes are from or what this wine is about, you can spend the rest of your life studying wine.”
Jazz is the same, Benson said, but you don’t have to be a jazz aficionado to listen to The Jazz Station.
“The Jazz Station is built for general listening,” Benson said. “It’s built so that anybody can just turn it on and get a really good cross section of the history of the music. If I want to listen to some more difficult or more challenging jazz, I’ll go and choose that myself and listen to it separately.”
There are limits, however, and some of the outer limits of jazz irk him.
“The further things get away from the root, the less interested I am. As I've gotten older, I like my jazz for the most part more melodic and less, well, I call it math music. Like somebody's working on a math equation with a saxophone, and I'm like, ‘Yeah, maybe I’m in the mood for it,” but usually it’s just not for me.”
In addition to his own collection, Benson said that people are constantly sending him new music.
“I’ve networked myself into the jazz record community, and I get way too much music—I can’t possibly play it all. But it’s a way for people to keep up on some of the newer material that’s out there.”
He said the jazz world has taken notice of his station.
“There’s a jazz trade magazine called “Jazz Week,” and I report as a radio station to them so that I’m part of a national tracking across the country. I’ve got a certain platform and visibility within the jazz industry. People know we exist, and the audience has really grown a lot in three years.”
Still, as any owner of a website knows, it’s hard getting the word out. “I’m always looking for ways to let people know that it exists,” he said.
BenSonic and The Odd Sunday
Benson also has two other stations—BenSonic and TheOddSunday, though the latter is more a show than a station.
BenSonic plays the music Benson grew up loving and listening to.
“It’s a combination of the music that I grew up with and the rock music that I love that I play. It’s very similar to KFOG. It’s everything from Chuck Berry to Dave Matthews to Bonnie Raitt. That’s the music I started playing on the radio when I started, but I continue to love it to this day. I don’t think that that core group of artists from my generation, they don’t get much airplay anymore.”
Benson reels off a list of names of artists that just played on BenSonic in the last hour: Leo Kottke; Paul Simon; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Suzanne Vega; Santana; Beck; and Robbie Robertson.
“Ben Sonic is growing really quickly,” he said. “Because it’s not jazz, it’s more accessible to people, and I’m finding that people are taking to it pretty quickly.”
The Odd Sunday is an outgrowth of a program he developed at KOWS, the local west county radio station.
A passion for the music
While producing all this radio content sounds like a full-time job, Benson said it’s not.
“It’s kind of like a garden. It takes as much time as you want to give it. It requires a certain amount of almost daily maintenance just to make sure that it’s on, to add new music, to create the playlists, even just listening to make sure that it sounds the way I want it to sound. It probably takes me 15 to 20 hours a week to keep all three projects going.”
Not surprisingly, Benson has a huge library of music.
“Ben Sonic is more of a freeform program, but I'm particular about what I play. I’m heading towards 100,000 songs in my library. I've been collecting since I was a teenager. And this is a chance for me to do with all the other music what I did for The Jazz Station. The Jazz Station also has over 8,000 titles in it, and it's growing. No radio station in town has anywhere near that.”
The why for him is simple: “I just like to keep in touch with music, and I like playing music for people. That’s just what I’ve always done.”
Listen to The Jazz Station, Ben Sonic or The Odd Sunday.