It's Armageddon, so let's go out Swinging!

Listen Now 'Are We Here Yet?' Podcast

We’re living through exceptional times. If you’re anything like me, you find your bearings by making great art and celebrating the great art of those around us. So to end 2025 at ‘Are We Here Yet?’ we got together with 2025-2027 Massachusetts Beat Poet Laureate Joshua Michael Stewart for a look at some of our favorite tunes from the post-pop days of the Big Band Era.

And can we just say….

We’ve wanted to do this episode for some time for the reason that there are so many, LIVING, BREATHING great musicians making great music within the big band idiom. People you can talk to, engage with, never mind support while they are alive.

So after digging this episode from us, go out and purchase yourself some albums by living, breathing artists while you plan your contribution to reversing the impending doom.

Intro

Join co-hosts Joshua Michael Stewart & Scott Graves on a musical look at just what all those Big Band musicians were doing decades after the end of the Big Band Era.

The popular culture phenomenon of swing music did not end when the record deals started drying up. The spectrum and synthesis of styles, the premium musicianship and the comradery between bands and fans continued to the present date.

We bring you more than a dozen recordings in their whole from the seventies to now including mostly musicians and bands still very much alive.

You’ll experience the music of Buddy Rich, Clayton/Hamilton Big Band, Count Basie, The Either Orchestra and folks new the scene like Omar Thomas.

And my co-host put together a larger playlist for those of you who want to swing the night away. Listen Now

What they say about JMS:

There’s a fearlessness in Joshua Michael Stewart’s poetry—tough, tightly written narratives and monologues about living poor with broken people (some of whom are your closest relatives) in hard times. This heartfelt gritty work reminds me of the hardscrabble accounts of humanity in some of our best poets—the work of Ai, Bruce Weigel, and Linda McCarriston’s landmark book, Eva-Marie. Stewart exercises the courage of truth telling and takes the revenge of real poetic craft. As Bruce Weigel says “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” Or as Stewart says, “Poets are the battered spouses of hope.” You can’t help but respect the maker of these streamlined vehicles, for his guts and his unsentimental, vivid poems. -Tony Hoagland