Listen / Download

You don’t think of jazz musicians wearing cowboy hats, but it’s happened. In the dance halls of Texas and Oklahoma a new sound was heard in the 1930s. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys combined big band swing with country traditions in a genre that came to be known as Western Swing.

The musicianship was first-class. Virtuoso fiddlers, guitarists, electric mandolin and pedal steel players — string players all — worked tight arrangements in the manner of Count Basie’s Kansas City horn section. While Benny Goodman was all the rage in Chicago and New York, Western Swingers like Wills, Milton Brown and Spade Cooley were the buzz along Route 66.

They covered a lot of hits, but Bing Crosby sold a million records covering one of theirs, San Antonio Rose. Western Swing hit a popular peak in the late 40s; aficionados and revivalists have never let it die.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

The Hot Club of Cowtown

Listen / Download

You’re a Bobo by David Brooks’ definition, if “Question Authority” is your all-time favorite bumper sticker and you’re now a start-up CEO.

You’re a Bobo if you’re an intellectual with your very own market niche. You’re a Bobo if you laughed at that “plastics” line in “The Graduate” and you’re making a good living in, well, plastics.

You’re a Bobo if you have some business sense and still some anti-business sensibility; if you’ve bought into some of the other wonderfully contradictory slogans of our time: “compassionate conservatism,” sustainable development, practical idealism.

“Bobo” is David Brooks’ compound of bourgeois and bohemian. In our coffee shops and smart magazine ads, Bobos are our models now: not beatniks or Babbitts anymore but some of each; they’re an anti-elitist elite; they stand for the dream of virtue crowned with success!

David Brooks’ take on the new upper class and how they got there is on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Brooks, author of “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.”

Listen / Download

The micro-lending Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus got his economics Ph.D. in America but learned the real thing back home, travelling village to village.

He watched one woman, for example, making bamboo stools for two pennies a day. “And I couldn’t believe,” he said, “that anybody could make such a beautiful product and earn so little.” For want of a little capital, she couldn’t buy her bamboo, and lived at the mercy of the man who traded in it.

But with a tiny loan from the bank, she was an independent entrepreneur. That was 15 years ago. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank have made millions of loans by now, some no more than a dollar, to the poorest of the poor, mostly women.

The repayment rate is 98 percent. The moral, he says, is that what separates millions, maybe billions of people from self-sufficiency is just a few dollars worth of credit.

The father of micro-credit, Muhammad Yunus in the second hour of The Connection – and with Maria Otero, President and CEO of Accion International, a micro-lending bank that works mostly with people in Latin America; Jonathan Morduch, an economist at Princeton University; and Gayle Ferraro, a documentary filmmaker who produced a film about several women who took out loans from the Grameen Bank. Mohammed Yunus, is the founder of the Grameen bank in Bangladesh.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen bank in Bangladesh
Maria Otero, President and CEO of Accion International, a micro-lending bank that works mostly with people in Latin America

Jonathan Morduch, an economist at Princeton University

and Gayle Ferraro, a documentary filmmaker who produced a film about several women who took out loans from the Grameen Bank.

Listen / Download

Sunday Anthony Ishola Adeniyi A.K.A. King Sunny Ade was born a real prince but became the King of Juju music.

Along with his band the African Beats Kind Sunny Ade became international worldbeat stars long before the term was ever coined. He the brought to the world the hypnotic grooves, talking drums and Yoruban dialect of his native Nigerian juju music to the world.

King Sunny Ade and his African Beats were Island records’ choice for the next Bob Marley in the early eighties. They were the biggest band from the largest city of the most populated country in Africa and they paved the way for African pop-stars like Angelique Kidjo, Yousou N’Door, and Salif Keita as well as the cross cultural music excursion of American musicians like Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon and David Byrne.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

King Sunny Ade