For the past five years David Brent Johnson has guest-hosted for Joe Bourne on WFIU’s Just You and Me, as well as hosting The Big Bands and producing WFIU documentaries about 1920s jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke and Duke Ellington’s 1941 civil-rights musical Jump for Joy. He hosted a weekly jazz program, All That Jazz, at Bloomington’s community radio station WFHB from 1999 to 2004. A writer who’s published frequently in the Ryder, the Bloomington Independent, and Indianapolis Nuvo, he won the 2002 Society of Professional Journalists’ award for best arts writing for an Indiana weekly. In 2004 he began the weekly WFIU historical jazz program Night Lights, and now hosts Afterglow as well.

Music, literature, and history are long-held enthusiasms for Johnson, but he came to jazz only in his mid-twenties.

I had a handful of jazz LPs and a friend who was really immersed in the music,” he says, “but there was one day when I was sitting in a coffeehouse reading and heard a Count Basie song coming from the overhead speakers. It was my ‘light-on-the-road-to-Damascus’ moment. I also gave up smoking around that time, and all of my addictive energy and cigarette money went into buying jazz CDs instead.”

Johnson lives with his wife in Bloomington’s Near-Westside neighborhood, a short walk from the gravesite of Hoagy Carmichael. He is currently working on a series about the history of Indiana jazz.