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Night Lights, WFIU's new Saturday-evening jazz program hosted by David Brent Johnson, focuses primarily on 1950s and 60s artists such as Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Jackie McLean, and Nina Simone, in addition to jazz from 1970 to the present that has a late-night sensibility.

"Jazz just sounds so good in the evening," Johnson says. "It sounds good any time, but it's really a nighttime music at heart. It's romantic, it's intellectual, and it has a kind of perpetual cool."

Night Lights also features many lesser-known talents of post-1945 jazz, such as Richard Twardzik, the brilliant young pianist who died at the age of 24 in 1955, trumpeter Joe Gordon, singer Jackie Paris, and saxophonist Tina Brooks. "In the 1945-1970 era there were so many amazing people recording and performing that many of them never became known outside the jazz world," says Johnson. "And I'm going to play artists from the 1970s and 80s who didn't really get their due either-musicians such as pianist Don Pullen and saxophonist Jim Pepper. There's a tendency to think of those decades as the decades of fusion and the Young Lions, but there was so much more going on than that."

The role of jazz in mid-20th century American popular culture is something else that Johnson intends to explore in Night Lights. "I have shows planned around the TV series 'Peter Gunn' and The Subterraneans, which was a pretty bad 1960 movie based on a Jack Kerouac novel," he says. "Gerry Mulligan and a number of other jazz musicians acted and played in it. I'm doing a show on The Connection, which was a Living Theater play and movie about addicts that featured jazz artists like Jackie McLean in the cast." He's also using spoken-word pieces by poets and monologists such as Frank O'Hara and Ken Nordine to develop what he calls "cultural narratives" about jazz.

"I'm very influenced by some of the new jazz historians like Scott DeVeaux (The Birth of Bebop) and Krin Gabbard (Jammin' at the Margins), who have a passionate love for the music and a keen interest in all of the social forces that helped to shape it," says Johnson. "I want Night Lights to be a program of jazz in sound, story and song."

Night Lights is engineered by Michael Paskash and produced in the studios of WFIU at Indiana University.