If you listen to this show at the link below you will hear a very excited, slightly nervous, and highly determined radio host, me, staring down a huge station console. A wing and a prayer… well – no. I was trained well by Davyne Dial from WPVM and had a partner in crime, James Navé, to help me through it. Lester the Nightfly Live.

And so I did it. And it went so very well. The result of which is that I now have a great interest in doing this live thing early and often. It was really fun, very satisfying.

A Crowd-Sourced Show About the Autumn

This playlist started out small, got huge, was winnowed down again, and then started to take on a life of its own. On the “cutting room floor” were such amazing tracks that I could have easily turned this into two or three shows. But I kept my cool this time… just the one show for this autumn.

Minimalism at its Best

Stephen Michael Reich (/raɪʃ/ RYSH; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s.

The American composer and critic Kyle Gann has said that Reich “may … be considered, by general acclamation, America’s greatest living composer”. Reich’s style of composition has influenced many other composers and musical groups, including John Adams, the progressive rock band King Crimson, the new-age guitarist Michael Hedges, the art-pop and electronic musician Brian Eno, the experimental art/music group the Residents, the electronic group Underworld, the composers associated with the Bang on a Can festival (including David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe), and numerous indie rock musicians including songwriters Sufjan Stevens and Matthew Healy of the 1975, and instrumental ensembles Tortoise, The Mercury Program, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor (who titled an unreleased song “Steve Reich”).

The title comes from the Hebrew word for “psalms”, and the work is the first to reflect Reich’s Jewish heritage. It is in four parts, marked fast, fast, slow, and fast.

Tehillim is the setting of Psalms 19:2–5 (19:1–4 in Christian translations); Psalm 34:13–15 (34:12–14); Psalm 18:26–27 (18:25–26); and finally Psalm 150:4–6. The four parts of the work are based on these four texts, respectively. “Literally translated [the word Tehillim] means ‘praises’,” writes Steve Reich in his composer’s notes, “and it derives from the three letter Hebrew root ‘hey, lamed, lamed’ (hll) which is also the root of halleluyah.”