Kaleidoscope finds a new home
Longtime Capital Region radio favorite debuts Monday on The X
MALTA, N.Y. » A longtime staple of the local radio and music scenes has found a new home.
Kaleidoscope, hosted by Jim Barrett, is making a move to WAIX- FM 106.1 ( The X). The weekly show will debut on its new station from 8 to 10 p. m. Monday, starting a new chapter in its long history. Barrett, a Troy native, has hosted this diverse and eclectic popular radio show for the last 50 years. He founded it in 1967 on Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s college station, WRPI, with friend Marty Dion, who also had a passion for all types of music. After WRPI, Kaleidoscope moved to Albany Broadcasting, and then most recently to WVCR- FM.
Barrett said the jump to The X, a station launched earlier this year by Malta- based Empire Broadcasting Company, was a new opportunity to work with people who play the same kind of music he does. Although he enjoyed his time airing Kaleidoscope on the Siena College station under the direction of producer Dean Charette, Barrett said, “I felt it was time for a change.”
Since The X began broadcasting in June, Barrett has been extremely impressed with the quality of its programming, especially its variety.
“It’s a mixed bag of all kinds of great music,” he said.
What Barrett love most is that The X regularly features local music. “
“One of the things that really swung me was that they play local music on the hour,” he observed, and every day at lunch.”
A huge advocate for local music, Barrett considers it his responsibility on air to support the music scene in the area. That’s made easier by the fact, he said,
that a lot of it is quite good.
“The Northeast is one of the most incredible places for local music in the country right now, without a doubt,” he said.
Although Kaleidoscope has switched stations a few times in its half- centruy on the air, Barrett said the show itself has not changed.
“It virtually is exactly what it always was,” he said of the mix of traditional music, blues, jazz, soul, hard rock, punk rock, reggae, classical and more. “You name it, we play it. Anything that’s interesting, I play.”
In addition to hosting Kaleidoscope once a week for the past half- century, Barrett runs the River Street Beat Shop in downtown Troy with his son, Liam.
“They kind of go hand in hand,” Barrett said. “That’s how we get a pretty good idea of what people want.”
It’s also how he gets to know a lot of local musicians, whom he often invites as guests on the show.
“It doesn’t feel like a long time,” Barrett said of his 50 years on the air. “I have never got sick of programming a radio show. It’s never bored me.”
Art Fredette, co- program director of The X with David Decker, is happy to have Barrett on the station and to be working with him on the show once again. In the early 1980s, Barrett was the one who helped Fredette start his career in radio, inviting him to be a part of Kaleidoscope when it still aired on WRPI.
“It’s like bringing it all back home in a way,” Fredette said.
Fredette said Barrett’s long- running show fits perfectly with The X, “and, if anything, his style of show will bring us to a better level of what we do. He is just a creative maniac on the air.”
Since the inception of The X, Empire Broadcasting Company owners Joe Tardi and Joe Reilly have wanted to get Barrett on board, no matter what it took. For listeners, Fredette said Barrett and Kaleidoscope will bring exposure to new music, local music and wider varieties of music, more so than any other show on the airwaves.
“He’s the cherry on top of the sundae for us.”