In 1985 Tyehimba Jess, an undergrad from Detroit, wanted to be a jazz DJ on WHPK. “All the cool cats knew what jazz was,” he says. “The guys who knew about jazz were the hippest people.” But he wasn’t one of those guys. And to get a slot, you had to submit a sample playlist.

So Jess, AB’91, went to Spin-It, a now-defunct record store on 57th Street, and flipped through the jazz section. “Who’s this guy? Charles Mingus, OK. Pick something off the back. The funny thing about jazz records, you really can judge them by the covers.” He turned in his playlist and was immediately given a slot. “They said it was one of the best jazz playlists they’d ever seen.”

https://mag.uchicago.edu/arts-humanities/tyehimba-jesss-contrapuntal-poems