James Fletcher, one of ten talented community broadcasters recruited by Amrap earlier this year, is relishing his new music correspondent role. He says it offers "a great chance to raise (his) sights and produce really high quality packages of a longer length.”

“A good package has lots of elements in it - music, interviews, atmos, narrative - and almost unlimited ways of presenting and balancing those elements. So the choices you make are fun in a creative sense, and having the finished product is a great sense of achievement.”

“For my first package [about the Jazzgroove Association] I took on a pretty big subject, so managing the sheer amount of information was a challenge, but one which forced me to really concentrate on defining what I wanted to say with the package, and pulling out the best audio to do this.”

The selected correspondents provide a good mix of music knowledge and specialist interests, while their geographical spread ensures that stories represent activities from around the country.

Besides Jazzgroove, other subjects covered in the first monthly batch include artist profiles of Perth pop outfit The Hampdens, electronic artist Meem, jazz vocalist Michelle Nicolle, world music performers The Charlie Moorland Trio, Khalil Gudaz & Drum Drum, as well as reports on Club Acoustica and Tasmusic.
Some of the subjects to be covered in the next batch of packages (for delivery in May) include musical comedy, and indigenous and blues music.

Darwin-based music correspondent Rico Adjrun, (as well as Melbourne-based Simone Ubaldi), had well honed production skills from working on last year’s Amrap / noise project, on which the current initiative is modelled.

So not only was Rico aware of the amount of work involved in this sort of exercise, but he was keen for more. "With producing these radio pieces, what I enjoy is that it is an extension of what I'm currently doing…work on/with radio. I love every aspect of the industry.”

And while producing radio packages is time and labor intensive, the experience yields a great deal of satisfaction, as James explains:

“It's always a good challenge to do something you haven't done before, and something like this is a way to take my production skills to a higher level. But it's also a really enjoyable creative act. And, like all radio production, doing the stories satisfies my natural curiosity about the world - at the end of a package I've always learned something new about the music or musicians I've covered.”

More details about the packages and the full list of Music Correspondents can be found at www.amrap.org.au

Music Correspondent radio packages can be ordered from the Australian Music & Items section of the DDN Online Ordering System www.ddn.com.au

Packages are also available on AMRAP’s website (www.amrap.org ) for download.

For more information about Amrap’s Music Correspondent initiative email Jane Costessi jcostessi@cbaa.org.au