About Terrell LaMarr
“Hey. I'm Terrell LaMarr. I work in education and have been working with and in service to youth since I was one myself. I started doing radio about 9 years ago and really enjoy it. Music is obviously a passion. I collect records, read books, watch movies and sports. I don't know, introductions are hard.”
Terrell enjoys going to concerts in his spare time. “The pandemic has been really difficult for me in that regard. Pre-covid there were stretches where I'd be at up to 3 or 4 shows a week. I also really enjoy traveling, trying new restaurants, discovering new music, and biking is a new hobby as well.”
“Growing up in the Twin Cities, my earliest experiences with indie music were with the local hip hop scene that I really started engaging with as a teenager. Around my sophomore year of high school I started to get familiar with local artists and became a big supporter of underground hip hop. I really started to reject a lot of what was popular or mainstream and went the backpacker route sans jansport. My interest in jazz, like a lot of other things, came through hip hop. I was always a fan of the jazzier tracks on rap albums but I didn't really have a way to engage with jazz beyond that. I didn't know anyone who listened to it much, so entry points weren't always easy to find. I also tend to gravitate more toward what's current than things from the past. So, the first jazz artist I became a big fan of was Esperanza Spalding, when she released her second album, Esperanza. That led me to artists like Jose James, Gretchen Parlato, Magos Herrera, Gregory Porter -- vocal jazz mainly. My mother even ended up recommending I check out George Duke. In the past few years, I've really been excited about the London jazz scene. There's really something special happening there and it's amazing to see all of these young musicians of color making jazz fun, and danceable, and cool.”
“Right now, I'm really interested in R&B en español as a subgenre. But we live in a world where genres mean less and less, so while lots of things I choose to play tend to be on the R&B side, it's always hard for me to say we play this genre or that one. And our show really pulls from a lot of places. You might catch a show that has a set of Rock en español, followed by a set of Bachata, followed by Jazz and Funk. Radio Pocho tries to give exposure to up-and-coming artists and show love to local musicians. Sometimes we have a theme which could be related to current events, anniversaries or holidays, or whatever we may come up with. It's important to us to be very aware of the voices we're featuring and try our best to make sure there's great representation of marginalized voices on the show. Sequencing is one of my favorite parts of putting an episode together. I really try to spend time figuring out what songs make sense being played next to each other. Usually, that means finding similarities sonically, in vibe, in tone, or even thematically.”
Terrell’s favorite albums at the moment are Hiatus Kaiyote’s new album, Mood Valiant, Sons of Kemets’ album, Back To The Future, and Nubya Garcia’s album SOURCE.
When Terrell is not talking about the music on the show he also talks about “what’s happening in our world. Last year, with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the uprising that followed and the court cases this year, we've talked a lot about those things. So, while we're a music show, I also think we'd be doing a disservice to ourselves, our listeners, and the communities that we come from to not speak about those issues.”
