Well it's happened again. Another musical icon of my life is gone.

I never realized how important radio has been in my life, until I started actually evaluating my entertainment habits. I listen to the radio in the car ALL THE TIME. I listen to the radio when I am home alone. And radio is a personal thing to me. It seems that the radio stations in my car are from a different planet than my kids' stations.

My life was stable... the same stations and format for years. A radio station's format is aimed at only one type of audience. You won't find classical, rock, jazz and intelligent talk on the same station. Public radio doesn't count because you get a multitude of various content everyday. Still, targeted at a more educated, urbane and affluent audience.

Anyway, slowly over the years, my favorite (and only) stations changed formats:

First it was WNCN. Next it was WNEW, THE PLACE WHERE ROCK LIVES. Well, lived.  Both of these incidents was chronicled in a past column call THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED... AGAIN... AGAIN. Click that title to read it. (And then please come back here for the rest of this column.)

Well, they did it to me again. WQCD, known as CD-101.9 has been changed to yet another insipid rock station, WRXP (the Rock eXPerience).

CD-101.9 started as the first "smooth jazz station in New York. It's only competition at the time was WYRS out of Connecticut, which was difficult to receive. Well CD-101.9 caused WYRS's demise. YRS was playing pure jazz, not smooth jazz. Jazz out of the 50s and 60s, not the 90s.

Then CD-101.9's management decided that it ought to be more "ethnic". We started hearing more Luther Vandross and less Basia. Then they began appealing to the masses, where you'd hear Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra playing LOVE'S THEME. I even heard THE HUSTLE played. (Not once, however, did they play anything from Huey Lewis and the News album SMALL WORLD, which had a guest appearance by Stan Getz!)

Well the new format did them in and we, the audience (yes me too!) left in disgust. So now, New York is without a jazz station (we won't discuss WRVR as that was before my musical maturity!) unless you consider that CD101.9 is on HD radio, which no one I know owns.

When, oh when, will radio execs learn to leave a good thing alone?... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.