WRTI’s Bob Perkins steps away from weeknight jazz broadcasts

Thursday marks the end of an era at 90.1 WRTI-FM, with longtime jazz DJ Bob Perkins signing off from his final weeknight shift after 25 years at the station.

Perkins, known to listeners as “BP with the GM” (“Bob Perkins with the Good Music”), will now work a reduced on-air schedule, helming a single weekly show — “Sunday Jazz Brunch” — on Sunday mornings. He announced his retirement from weeknight shows in April.

“People call me and tell me, ‘I didn’t like jazz till you played it,’” Perkins told The Inquirer in 2016. “I like melody. Something they can hum. Music they danced and romanced to when they were young people.”

Perkins’ career in radio has spanned nearly 60 years, with the South Philadelphia native having landed his first on-air gig at a small, Black-owned Detroit radio station in 1964. In 1969, he headed home to Philly, where he began working as a news and editorial director at WDAS-FM, which was then known as “the voice of the Black community.” He stayed at that station for nearly two decades.

“I did what I could,” he told The Inquirer in 2020, “because I didn’t know a thing about writing editorials. But I mimicked what I thought the great guys I’d grown up with would do, and I got away with it for years.”

In 1977, Perkins, 88, started up a side gig with a public radio Saturday night jazz show at 90.9 WHYY-FM — the station where he coined his “BP with the GM” moniker. Later, in the mid-’80s, Perkins hosted a WDAS-AM jazz show that mixed in Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee with jazz artists like Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

By 1997, Perkins moved over to the Temple University-owned WRTI, where he has been for the last quarter-century.

“Bob is jazz radio,” David Conant, former general manager at WRTI, told The Inquirer in 2016. “He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the music and the musicians, and has known many of the greats. … Bob’s staying power is a testament to his greatness. He is genuine, a real original.”

Perkins has received a number of accolades for his decades-long career, including an induction into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia Hall of Fame in 2003. In 2016, he was inducted into the Philadelphia Music Walk of Fame as part of the Philadelphia Music Alliance’s all-jazz class of that year.

WRTI has not yet put a new DJ in Perkins’ usual weeknight spot, which will temporarily be filled by station associate general manager Josh Jackson, KYW Newsradio reported.

“I’m the only one that’s doing this thing on regular radio and I enjoy very much what I’m doing, and the feedback that I get from people who enjoy it. Maybe it’s one of the high points in their life,” Perkins told The Inquirer in 2020. “Music. That’s our savior, man.”