What's old is new again: This past May, for the first time in more more than a decade and a half, classical music returned to Milwaukee radio's daily airwaves with Wisconsin Public Radio's new WPR Music network, heard on 20 WPR stations around Wisconsin, including 90.7 FM in Milwaukee. 

Well, that's not entirely accurate – especially during the station's daily "Drivetime Classics" show, airing weekdays from 4-7 p.m. Hosted by Jason Heilman, there's nothing old about the show's approach to classical music. Forget any preconceived notions about stodginess or being stuck in the past: Heilman wants to show listeners classical can be just exciting and relevant as today's top 40, a genre not exclusively for exclusive tastes but for all.

"If you like hard-driving rhythms, there’s a classical composer for you. If you like soft Motown ballads, there’s a classical composer for you," Heilman said. "There are all those gateways that are possible. On some level, music is music, and it’s all good. That’s an important thing to realize."

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Classical music isn't the only thing making a grand Wisconsin return courtesy of 90.7 FM, as the "Drivetime Classics" host originally called the state home as a child, living in Waldo outside of Plymouth until around the age of five. Since he left, Heilman's mostly called Tulsa, Oklahoma home, going to school at Tulsa University, hosting Public Radio Tulsa's classical music program and helping communicate classical music's old and new appeal as a co-founder, managing director and concert narrator for the Tulsa Camerata. But now he's back in the Badger State, broadcasting daily from Milwaukee – an even bigger setting to promote the big umbrella that classical music can be.

Now with a few months under his Brew City broadcasting belt, I chatted with Heilman about how he fell in love with classical music, how the genre can be fresh rather than fuddy-duddy, returning to Wisconsin, his favorite recent musical discoveries and his favorite discoveries concerning one of his other passions, one he's certainly in the right place for now: beer. 

OnMilwaukee: When did your interest and passion for classical music and music in general really hit?

Jason Heilman: Well, I started playing the trumpet in the sixth grade. And initially I wasn’t very good at it – at all. I mean, I was really bad – usually the last chair. Sometime in the seventh grade, my band director took me aside and said, “You know, if you don’t do well on this next chair test, we’re going to have to drop you out of the band.” It was to play something like “Variations on My Old Kentucky Home” or something around that order, and we had to stand up in front of the class and play it one at a time. So I really practiced over the weekend – like hours and hours of practice – and when it came time for the test, I nailed it and suddenly I was first chair. I kind of learned that it takes a little work.

It wasn’t long after that I really started getting into it. I started to see that I could understand tunes, that with some work I could read them and see what they were supposed to be. And that broadened into wanting to hear other music and going to the library and checking out records. I still remember getting John Williams’ Boston Pops albums, and it just kind of kept growing and growing from there. 

And as I got better at playing the trumpet, I got more into music in general. At first, it was like, “OK, well, what can I play on the trumpet?” And then after a while that expanded into, “What else is there?” Fast forward from that, and now I’m constantly on the lookout for new music and new things to listen to – and that’s been something that’s been with me my whole life. I don’t know if I’ve told a whole story that makes sense (laughs) but that’s the path. It went from me being really bad at music and frustrated with it, to me suddenly being good at it and wanting to know more about it and get better and expand my musical horizons all the time.

How do you think playing the trumpet has influenced how you listen to classical music?

Well, “listen” is a great word, because when you’re an orchestral trumpet player, you don’t play a lot. You get to sit and listen to the orchestra – sometimes for hundreds of measures at a time. That went from being kind of frustrating to actually really a lot of fun. 

I can also trace my musical tastes thanks to it. Generally stuff with a lot of trumpet in it was what I used to like. I used to hate Mozart, for example, because Mozart never wrote anything much for the trumpet. Mozart kind of hated trumpet players too, so I sort of felt justified. But in time, as I got older and I got into a wider amount of music, that started to fade away, and my tastes evolved from what’s good and cool for the trumpet, to what’s really interesting. Then Mozart very quickly became one of my favorite composers – if I want to claim to have any favorite composers. I adore Mozart. So that was a transformation that happened for me, from a snarky trumpet player who didn’t like the guy to somebody who was really serious about music in general. 

Who are some of your favorite composers beyond Mozart? Are there any others that really excite you?

Yes – I’ll just say that. Because one of my goals as a classical radio host is for you to listen to me day in and day out, for years at a time, and never be able to figure out who my favorite composers are. I have my favorite composers; I also have composers that everyone likes that I kind of don’t. I have very strong opinions about music in general – but when I’m on air, I’m playing for everybody. So I don’t want to avoid playing somebody’s favorite composer because I don’t like them, and at the same time, I don’t want to bore people to death with only the music that I like a lot. 

I will say that it’s a little easy to predict what kind of music that I like because I’ve never really stopped being a trumpet player, so a lot of that kind of music that appeals to me. I also, before I got into classical music, listened to hard rock and heavy metal, and there’s a kind of pipeline there that’s really interesting between that style of music and some composers. 

I used to teach college, and one of the things I would teach the students to ask themselves is: Why do I like the music that I like? What is it about this music that I like? Most people don’t think about that; we just have our musical tastes, and we don’t really question them very much. And a lot of times, our musical tastes come from extra-musical things, like associations with something that happened to us in our lives or the song that you associate with your significant other or what was popular when you were in high school. But sometimes, if you think about what kind of music you really like, you’ll start to discover that there’s a lot of music that’s like it out there, that you just haven’t heard of, and you can branch out from there. That was kind of a revelation for me, so I’ve tried to teach that to other people too.

You are coming from Wisconsin from Tulsa. Any big memories that stand out from those early Wisconsin days?

Snow – that was a big memory that I had. That was very impressive to me as a kid, that you could build these massive sled runs in your backyard – and that’s not something I was ever able to do again in life. And it was kind of a rural setting where I was, so I remember there being horses around and things like that – and it’s still a bit like that. We lived in Waldo when I was little, which is a very small town outside of Plymouth, which is outside of Sheboygan – and that was a quite different setting than Tulsa, which is a big city relatively speaking, just a little bit smaller than Milwaukee although it doesn’t quite have the same suburbs around it that Milwaukee does.

What most excites you about this new show at WPR?

Well, it’s music that we’re playing at a different time of day. We’re hitting people when they’re driving home from work, and that’s a nice captive audience to get, when you’re trapped in your car and you need something to get you to your next offramp and get you home after a long day. That’s a different kind of mindset for classical programming. I can’t just play a Tchaikovsky symphony, because people might only be able to listen to it ten minutes at a time. So I’m trying to meet the people where they are – in their cars, unwinding at the end of the day – and saying, “Hey, here’s this great piece that might just be what you need to hear right now. And ten minutes later, it’s going to be something completely different.” That’s what I’m really trying to do: play up the variety of classical music for people. Because really, there’s so much of it. 

It’s kind of amazing that we even consider this a genre by itself. I remember when there were record stores, and the classical section would be this tiny section in the corner, but there would be rock and heavy metal and acid rock and speed metal and all these tiny genres. That would take up the majority of the store, and classical music would be on the fringes – and the reality is the exact opposite. There’s 1,000 years of classical music and there’s so much of it that we’ve forgotten, that it’s great to be able to bring it back. Because some of the music we’ve forgotten we shouldn’t have. Some of the music we’ve forgotten is pretty great. And it kind of helps explain the music that we didn’t forget sometimes. That’s what I’m glad to show people: I really want to bring out the diversity of classical music for people.

That ties in nicely with my next question: When some people hear the phrase “classical music,” they think old, stodgy, these derogatory feelings. It sounds like you have a counter to that, that there’s more than this very rigid, dusty mentality toward the genre.

There’s a lot of ways to counter that, too. For one, classical music is still getting made. There are a lot of new compositions; our album of the week last week was a set of symphoninas, ten-minute symphonies that were just written by young composers to appeal to the TikTok generation. So these are brand new pieces of orchestral music – all short-format, all easy to listen to, doing the things that classical music does but also doing the things that you’re used to from other genres too.

The other thing is most of the recordings that we play are relatively recent too. We’re not necessarily having to go back into antiquity for some of these recordings; they’re still being made and produced. I think the average age of a record on our station is going to be a lot newer than a lot of the classic rock stations you listen to. This stuff is being kept alive and being reinterpreted and being injected with new life all the time, so it’s definitely still alive. 

What’s been your favorite recent musical discovery – whether it’s a subgenre in classical or a classical artist or something else?

It’s composers that I keep finding that I either never really knew or only vaguely heard of, and then I play them and think, “Wow, this is really great!” The last one was just maybe a week or two ago. I’m basically like a kid in a candy store with the Wisconsin Public Radio music library; there’s a lot of stuff in there that I’m still getting to know for the first time. 

One composer was Doreen Carwithen, a British composer from the middle of the 20th century. I was kind of vaguely aware of her, but I never really heard any of her music. But we had one of her albums in our library, so I listened to it, and it just blew me away. Music from the 1960s was kind of weird and challenging, and this is not all like that; it’s very listenable, but at the same time, it has an edge to it that you don’t expect to hear. So I played one of her overtures on the air. And then she has what I would consider the anthem for our times – I think she wrote it in the 1960s – an overture she called “One Damn Thing After Another.” I’m trying to get permission to play that on air (laughs).

It’s those kinds of discoveries that I really enjoy. I really just like finding a new composer who is not somebody I was expecting and not somebody I was expecting to really like, and suddenly it’s expanded my world that one step more. 

You make classical music sound really exciting, which the stereotype of classical music is not that.

That’s the thing: We present classical music sometimes like it’s good for you or like “Baby needs Mozart.”

Like it’s vegetables. 

Yes! And we’re not the Broccoli Foundation, right? All my friends who play classical music: This is how we talk about it. We talk about it like how other people might talk about sports. This is something that’s really exciting to us. We’ll say “have you heard this new album from so-and-so?” and we’ll argue about things and we have beloved composers that we have varying opinions about. And it’s a real, living, breathing thing for us – and that’s something I want to convey to our listeners. We’re not just presenting things in a musical museum here. This is a living, breathing thing that you should have strong opinions about.

Speaking of strong opinions, I read elsewhere that your passions are music, beer and coffee. You are now in Brew City, so I have to ask: What is your favorite beer, and have you found any local craft beers that you’ve really enjoyed coming back to town?

One of the things I really like about Milwaukee is there’s a much, much broader diversity of beers here than many of the other places I’ve lived. Tulsa has a craft beer scene – but it’s an IPA scene, and I’m not really an IPA guy. So I always had to kind of sheepishly demure from some of the beers there. But here, just about every brewery has a beer that I really like. In the fridge right now, I have something from Sprecher and something from Lakefront. Whenever I go out, I’m finding something new that I like that’s not an IPA. It’s really great – like a Vienna style or some of the amber lagers you have here, these are some of my favorite beer styles. 

I’m also really into cheese and sausage, which are sort of the next two on that list. I don’t necessary have those every day, but I’m in a sort of dangerous place for me. (Laughs) And we’ve been discovering the beer garden scene, which is sort of a mind-blowing thing for me coming from Oklahoma – that here we are sitting in a public park, drinking beer. But I also lived in Austria for a time, so that’s really bringing those memories back. It’s been great to discover all these things. I’m really having a good time here – I have to be careful not to have too good of a time, because I am supposed to work. (Laughs)