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| The Quiet Storm
Skeeter Sanders
Thursdays
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
About the Show
Aimed primarily at people listening at work, "The Quiet Storm" is a
relaxing melange of Smooth Jazz (Nelson Rangell, Pat Metheny, Richard
Elliot, Joyce Cooling, Norman Brown, etc.) and Cool R&B (Boyz II Men, Teena Marie, Angela Bofill, Luther Vandross, Brian McKnight, etc.) with occasional dashes of soft Adult Contemporary and New Age.
The only program of its kind on the air in northern New England, "The Quiet
Storm" includes two highlight features: "The Smooth Jazz Artist of
the Week" -- which, as its name implies, is a set of three songs by a featured
Smooth Jazz artist -- and "The Way-Back Machine," a set of three classic "old-school" Soul,
Funk and R&B tunes from the 1970s and 1980s.
Coinciding with WGDR's 35th anniversary, "The Quiet Storm" is
celebrating its own 10th anniversary this year. Debuting on June 6,
1998 as a Monday-morning program, the show moved to Sunday nights the
following September. It has aired in its present Thursday-afternoon
time slot since September 2003.
About the Host
Skeeter Sanders loves rainbows. The multi-colored arc has long
been a symbol ofdiversity. And Sanders is a living, breathing celebration
of diversity.
Born to an African American mother and Native American father in
1953, Sanders is about as multicultural as one can get. Aside from his
mixed heritage, He's a Pagan who follows Wiccan and Native traditions.
While no longer wearing flowers in his dreadlocked hair, he's had a love
affair with nearly all things hippie for almost four decades (he still
vacations at Rainbow Gatherings every summer).
His musical tastes run the gamut from the Smooth Jazz and Cool R&B he plays
on his "Quiet Storm" program to rock-and-roll, pop, '70s disco and
funk, folk, classic soul, techno, you name it.
He prefers the jeans-and-sneakers life in the slow lane to the dog-eat-dog
suit-and-tie corporate rat race (Consequently, he works full-time at Saint
Michael's College in Colchester when he's not spinning tunes on WGDR).
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A New York City native, Sanders grew up listening to then-Top
40 powerhouses WABC and WMCA and Urban FM pioneer WBLS. It was the
late WABC DJ Chuck Leonard, one of the first African Americans to break
into mainstream radio, who inspired him in 1967 to go into broadcasting.
But nearly 30 years would pass before Sanders would put his childhood
dream
into practice, launching a short-lived classic-soul program on the University of Vermont's WRUV-FM in 1996. He moved to WGDR two years later to launch "The Quiet Storm," patterned after the namesake format pioneered in 1979 by WBLS' sister station, KBLX in San Fransisco.
Along the way, the professional lives of Sanders and WGDR General Manager
Greg Hooker would cross in December 1998, when Hooker, then Program
Director at WNCS (The Point), listened to one of Sanders' then-Sunday night broadcasts at his home in Marshfield and invited him to send in a resume and demo tape.
One thing led to another and for the next three years, Sanders anchored
The Point's Saturday overnight music. "They were three of the happiest years of my radio career," he said, while maintaining his WGDR show.
Despite being laid off from The Point in January 2002 (The result of a downsizing ordered by the station's parent company), Sanders and Hooker
remained friends and when he learned that Hooker was hired by Goddard
College to be WGDR's General Manager, Sanders was "ecstatic."
Today, in addition to holding court on "The Quiet Storm,"Sanders also
writes a thought-provoking weekly Internet commentary on politics, called "The 'Skeeter Bites Report," which you can read at
www.skeeterbitesreport.com
email Skeeter:
TheQuietStormVT@hotmail.com
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