The New Yorker Radio Hour - Christmas Music Reimagined with Kirk Douglas, the Guitarist for the Roots

Episode Date: December 23, 2018

Kirk Douglas, the guitarist for the Roots, plays anything and everything as part of the “Tonight Show” band, so David Remnick put him to the test on some holiday classics.  Roz Chast rings a bell to collect pennies for a good cause: saving the globe from destruction by asteroid. And a religion scholar who just translated the New Testament from the original Greek explains why we’ve been getting the book wrong all these years.    New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And here is Roz Chast. Support near-ear earth object research. Support near-ear earth object research. It's important, people. You might know Roz's work from the pages of the magazine or from books like, can't we talk about something more pleasant, which was a finalist for the National Book Award a few years ago. And if you've seen her work, you might even guess that she's someone who tends to worry a little bit. And you'd be absolutely right. My name is Roz, Roz Chast. I'm a cartoonist for the New Yorker.

And inspired by the Salvation Army, I got myself a bell. I got myself a bucket. And I made a sign that explains what I think. think this is all about. This is near-Earth object research. And what is that? Okay. If you go to planetary.org, it's a grant for scientists so that they can research objects like asteroids that come close to Earth. Oh, unfortunately, I can't donate today. I'm unemployed right now, but perhaps if your sign was a bit more explicit. Yeah, you're probably right. You know, New Yorkers respond to terror. Yeah, yeah.

Probably should have made the sign a little more explicit. You're right. You're right. Thank you. I was paying a lot of attention to the lettering and the color, because that's my day job. Would you care to give to near-earth object research? We've raised 12 cents.

It's a start. Um, like maybe this is almost like, you know, it's thinking about your death. Like maybe to them, I'm not like some lady in a parka. I'm like, you know, the grim reaper, which in a way, you know, I am. I am telling them if they don't give money to fund this research, they probably will all die. The bell is tolling for you if you don't fund this research. So that's called soliciting. All right?

You go to 6th Avenue if you want to. Want to do that? Okay. It's going to go to the restrictions. Over there, there isn't any. Okay. Oh, we'll go to 6th Avenue. Okay.

Okay, thanks. Thank you. Okay. It's some kind of joke. You know, when that asteroid hits, it won't be so funny. I mean, it would be sort of quite astonishing if one fell right here in the middle, like right in front of us. Wouldn't that be great, kind of?

Planetary Society's Near Earth Object Grant Program, what is that? That is an organization started by Carl Sagan, and this group, they are... You just said the magic word, Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan. It should have been on the poster, right? You should have, yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, I don't have much to contribute, but we always want to mention Mr. Sagan. Thank you, yeah, he is the best. Thank you very much. Go to planetary.org and look up near-Earth object research because they are looking into it.

There's asteroids and, you know, they're out there. They might hit. So anyway, thank you very much. Thank you. Raj Chast on the streets of Manhattan. Only on streets where a soliciting is permitted, by the way. She raised $5.12 to help save the planet from asteroids. The 12 cents, I'm pretty sure, came from our producer, Stephen Valenciennes.

who's generous that way. I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a guitar amateur. Not just a guitar player, but a guitar nerd, the kind who watches YouTube videos of, okay, stuff about gear, people from Norway showing me how to play a solo. And one of my favorites, truly one of my heroes in guitar world, is a man with the given name Kirk Douglas.

But he goes by Captain Kirk, and he plays in the band The Roots. The Roots are an absolute phenomenon, going back more than 30 years. They carved out a unique place in hip-hop, combining jazz and soul and funk and rock, the whole ball of wax, and they've since become the house band for The Tonight Show, and they've played with everybody, from Jay-Z to Elvis Costello. Kirk Douglas is a singer and the lead guitarist for the roots, and I asked him to come by and bring his instrument, because we're going to put him to a holiday test.

You are a remarkable musician, and one of the things that's so remarkable about you is your versatility. And I wanted to get a sense of what you were listening to growing up on Long Island, right? Mm-hmm. You know, when I had no control over the music around me and it was all my parents, it was classical music on Sundays and a lot of reggae, a lot of soul, old soul, a lot of crooners, you know, Johnny Mathis, a lot of ska. You know, my parents love to throw parties, so they'd always be. a lot of, you know, Jamaican party music,

which a lot of times was Calypso and, and, but, you know, my dad, he'd be playing music till late in the night and he'd play, you know, old funk,

you know, like Samande. It was like you had the hippest parents in world history. Musically, at least. Yeah, I mean, but he had,

you know, my dad liked a lot of stuff, you know, that, um, I didn't, you know, at the time,

appreciate, you know, and I only started to appreciate later. Your parents wanted you to be a classical musician. They wanted you to go in that direction. They would have liked that, but the thing that attracted me to the guitar was the mystique of it with seeing Kiss, you know, when I was at a young age. So you wanted the whole notion of a guitar superhero appeal to as well as the music. Well, absolutely, yeah.

Like Kiss sort of embodied like the music and they matched the visual with the music. and they had these, you know, magical, almost like talisman with their instruments that they were able to, like, conjure these sounds with. And they looked cool. It was like they looked, you know, a guitar sort of looks like a combination of a spaceship and a surfboard and a car all rolled into one. It comes in different colors. So there's, it's no mistake that, you know, you have magazines that have cars and guitars

in the same magazine or the same book, you know. They can be shapely. too. You know, it's a very attractive instrument. So what's the first time you picked up a guitar and made a sound out of it that resembled music that made you think this could be my life?

Well, there was the attraction I spoke of and just walking past a music store and seeing them in the window and just wanting to just hold one, just to touch one. And the first time that I got to hold or touch one, I guess it wasn't

fifth grade? Sounds like an erotic attachment. I'm holding on to it now. You are indeed. Maybe I should put it down. Maybe I'll be able to speak more coherently. Who were your guitar gods at that time when you were learning

and coming up? Yeah, Eddie Van Halen, you know, deaf leopard was coming at at the time. Yeah, it's a little, sometimes it's a little embarrassing because, like, you know, for Roots fans, you know, they'd probably want to hear something a little deeper than that. You think people don't want to hear about white metal bands?

It confuses people? I think there's some, there can be some confusion. And I get, you know, sometimes I get flack for it at times from some of my bandmates. But it's just, you know, I was a product of my surroundings. Now, when you started with the roots, they were still a very hard traveling band, right? Yeah. Just a lot of bus, a lot of van. 250 dates a year.

So it's almost like BB King level touring. Yeah. Yeah. When they refer to themselves as the hardest working band show business, it was not an exaggeration. So now you have this gig that probably is a lot better for the stability of life. You're in New York all the time on the Fallon show, on the night show. How did that change things? And did it change the band in it?

any significant way. Well, I think the band was moving in a direction that would give us the, uh, the aptitude to hang in that situation. Because we, I think even before we started doing the tonight show, I think we already did a night of a hundred stars. I'm pretty sure that we did that first. Now, you had an experience with Prince. I think that he borrowed your guitar.

Mm-hmm. What happened? Oh, that's this guitar. This is this, we're sitting in a studio with a white epiphone. Yeah, it's a 1961 epiphone Crestwood guitar. So he came into play, this is what, before the Tonight Show was the Tonight Show, this is when it was still late night with Jimmy Fallon. He came in with his band, and apparently he arrived before his guitar did.

So he looked at my gaggle of guitars, and he saw this one, which, you know, he could have been attracted to the purple, strap on it, but it's a beautiful sounding, playing guitar. And right before the show started, our music booker at the time, Jonathan Cohen came up to me as like, Prince wants to use your guitar for the performance

and he wants to buy it from you. He wants to buy the guitar from me and he wants to use it for the performance. I said, well, Prince can use it for the performance, but he can't buy it from me. I'm not selling it. I love the guitar. So Prince is doing two songs that night. He plays the first song, I guess one of his new songs.

He plays it with his own guitar. And after he finished the first song, he comes over to me, he's like, yo, let me see that other guitar. And so like a Prince fan, I say, yeah, sure. And I offer it to him, I give it to him, and he goes and he plays an incendiary version of Bambi. for one of his earlier

album did an incredible version of it and then at the end of the song he picks the guitar up and I thought he's gonna play behind his head actually but he tosses it into the air

and towards no one no guitar tech is waiting to catch it no oh Jesus yeah and I mean just I was so excited watching him play that you know I was like I couldn't believe and then when he threw it

I just just the feeling like feeling, it just felt like instantaneous emotional abuse. That's just what it felt like. Where did it land? It laid it on the ground. Like it felt like on a monitor.

And it just strutted off the stage and Did you have words after? Yeah, yeah. I went, you know, they came up to and they was like, Prince wants to talk to you. I was like, oh, really? I'd like to talk to Prince, you know? And so I had, you know, I had the guitar

in like a couple pieces, you know, going towards the... Did it break? It broke, yeah, totally. What happened? The neck broke off from the body? This part. Oh, my God.

There's a big crack on the back of the headpiece. Yeah, yeah. But he apologized. He's like, I'm sorry. And he did say, you know, I'll take care of it. But the dough wasn't the thing. No, it wasn't. But anyhow, so like a Prince fan, I'm like, okay,

you broke the guitar. Do you think you could at least sign it? Did he sign the... No, he doesn't see a signature. What's the deal? Oh, I haven't signed anything since the 70s. Wow. In his own eccentric way, he totally did sign it.

You didn't use it, sign it with a pen. You sure did. I can see the giant crack behind it. Yeah. Yeah. So, in addition to having two kids that you're very attentive to, and rehearsing and touring, you've also got a new solo record that you're working on. Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing that.

That's sort of my guilty pleasure record. And that's just to exercise the part of me. that likes to come up with music. It's your musical journal, if you will. Is there a song from the new solo album you can tell us about? Maybe we'll play. Yeah, it's a song.

It's just a song called Our Year. I think I wrote it on a New Year's Day. Sort of, it's like my own personal, All-Land sign. One, two, three. Here's to the first day. It feels a little strange. I feel's a little strange

I stand in my own to change I wish that I could change The moment we all have been waiting for To finding the keys that unlock the door We're moving all down so we can be sure Let's let this year beautiful well now we're getting to the meat of the matter christmas songs it's with it's that time of year we hear the familiar songs over and over you're walking through a department store you're in the

back seat of a cab you're overhearing somebody else's headphones on the subway whatever it is now this isn't a matter of stump the stars but i want to ask you if you is there's something you can play us a kind of standard in your own way so that we'll love it again. Should we give it a shot? I've never really sat and tried to do this, so... There you go. I never tried that before. Okay, that wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to... That was off the top of your head. Yeah.

I think it's going to go downhill from here. I don't think so. I don't think so. Do you give yourself a new guitar for Christmas? Or you guitared out? Wow. No guitar. This is a therapy session or an interview? Yeah, like I'm this week, this time I'm going through a bass thing because I'm starting to do home recording and I realize I don't have a bass. And then I so I feel entitled to get a bass, but I also realize there's different, you know, there's different bass sounds you can go for. And the next thing you know, you have four new cases in that. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm going. There's going to be a Christmas base. All right. Yeah. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah.

Thank you, Kirk. You're welcome. Guitarist, Kirk Douglas. You can watch him performing just about every night with The Roots on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour,

and this is our sort of holiday edition with music from the guitarist Kirk Douglas, who plays in the Roots. Now, staff writer Vincent Cunningham is a man of wide interest, one of which is religion, and recently he spoke with the scholar David Bentley Hart, the author of a completely new translation of the New Testament from the Greek. That's an enormous undertaking, but also it's controversial because of how Hart approached the translation.

Hart is a literalist. His version of the Bible is, in his own words, almost pitilessly literal. Words and phrases that are accepted by Christians as doctrine suddenly get replaced with unfamiliar or ambiguous terms. nothing is smoothed over or clarified. If the original text is in badly written Greek, then Hart translates to badly written English. But in these literal renderings of the Gospels,

he finds a worldview that is sometimes at odds with the mainstream of Christianity. Here's the New Yorker's Vincent Cunningham with David Bentley Hart. I guess we should start, David, by just asking a little bit about your translation of the New Testament. But what was it that you thought was missing from prior translations that you were trying to capture with yours?

Well, there are strengths and virtues of many prior translations. Obviously, I wouldn't dream of trying to rival, say, the King James or the Coverdale for literary quality. But translation of the Bible only began in the 16th century at a time when doctrinal tradition had pretty much predetermined how certain words and certain, concepts were going to be rendered. And so part of the appeal of trying to do my own translation was simply to see if I could get

back to the text without all those presuppositions translating the text for me in advance. I guess I could also ask a more basic question is, why do people keep retranslating the Bible at all? I think some people would wonder,

isn't there a, you know, a quote-unquote correct translation by now? What is the urge to translate and translate again this text? Well, you could ask the same about Homer in a sense. I mean, more and more translations of Homer are appearing, and they're not getting any better. But in the case of the, obviously, of Scripture, there's more at stake for people, obviously, because people do try, there are many, you know, millions, actually billions of people

who at least putatively try to model their lives on these texts. and these traditions and these words. Right. And so it's always a matter, I think, of burning interest to get it right. I think it's good to unsettle us, too, because, of course, when we think we've gotten it right, we're always in danger of becoming intolerant, self-satisfied, dogmatical, cruel, fundamentalists, you know, that it's always healthy to be reminded that we've been getting most of it wrong most of the time. The most popular Protestant translation of the 20th century was the new international version.

I grew up with that, yeah. Right. There could scarcely be a more inaccurate translation, but it wasn't inaccurate by accident. Again and again and again, meanings were imposed on the text by translators who felt that their interpretation was the right one doctrinally and therefore the interpretation rather than just a plain translation. One of my favorite examples of this is the way we tend to translate the New Testament. I mean, the Lord's Prayer. The prayer has become the universal property of all Christians and even persons outside of Christianity, perhaps. But in its original form, it's very much a prayer for the poor in a state of real urgency, of privation, of economic duress. but you lose that in the translations that we have where words like ophilimata debts become trespasses

and even if they become debts they're understood as often as moral debts or spiritual debts whereas in the original, as the original, he really is talking about debt. This was the great crisis of the poor at the time as it has to be in any age, but indebtedness was destroying the rural poor. of Judea and the Galilee. And when he talks about daily bread, he means bread, epiucion, tonneumon, epiucion, dosi min simaron, means very simply, give us enough bread to get us through this day. Don't take us to court, really, Ton Pyrrasmon, you know.

Because the courts of the time, a great many of the poor were being hauled into the courts by their creditors and plundered of what little possessions they had because of the predatory lending practices of the time, and rescue us from the evil man or the wicked man, Apu Tuponiru, not from evil in the abstract, but from a wicked creditor who wants to rob you legally in the courts. In its unadorned and original form, it's very much a prayer for the poor against the injustices worked on them by the the rich. Given the Advent season as we sort of, as the Christian world waits for Christmas to come, I wonder if we could talk more specifically about the narrative that begins all four of the gospels, the birth of Christ, the Christmas story, that you in the course of your translation learned or kind of discovered about this very foundational story that had been obscured for you

previously. I was reminded again with Luke how much for him has to do with Christ being the revelation of the God who comes to the humble and the dispossessed and to the people who have no names in society and in history. And he comes as that kind of liberator. I mean, the Christmas story is a story about... the indigent and the oppressed. These are stories of poor people under an oppressive regime, displaced people even having to flee the country seeking refuge, seeking asylum elsewhere.

It reminded me that the profession of Christian faith and throughout history, but in America with a special kind of perversity, perhaps, seems at times to be utterly unrelated to the actual content of the Gospels. Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting this dynamic, you know, when people talk about the gospel and the terms that you've laid out, especially with respect to asylum seekers and refugees, people without a place to kind of even lay their heads, they're accused of politicizing the gospel. I mean, your claim is that, not your claim. I mean, what you uncover is that the politics are there, right? Yeah. I mean, I mean, that's like saying. that you're spiritualizing the guy. I mean, it makes no sense.

I mean, admittedly, the early Christians didn't represent what we would think of as a political movement now because they had no concept of overthrowing or changing a system of government and replacing it with another. But it is a polity. It is a distinct policy. It is a distinct prescription of how persons are supposed to live together under the shadow, so to speak, of the pronouncement that Christ has risen from the dead, right? Well, a little bit of Greek. Podosay, though, I mean, pinnante, dixote, and zinnon, and yimnon, and astheny, and

enfilaki. I mean, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger, or naked or ill, or in prison? Right. Well, I mean, that language has a remarkable resonance at the moment when you consider that the atrocities that the current administration here has committed against asylum seekers, it's almost a perfect one-to-one correspondence between that language in the gospel and what we see unfolding at our southern borders. And yet the voices, especially, I hate to say, of the white evangelical community seem to be on the side of the goats, not the sheep. We could go into that a little bit.

One of your recent pieces talked about why some sort of communitarian economics, you know, communism, socialism, however you want to slice it, makes more sense in a Christian context. Well, I mean, as I say, the texts are quite explicit and blunt the edge of some pronouncements, but others are right there at the surface. I mean, Christ explicitly tells his disciples, you can't own anything if you want to follow me. You can't hold on to any property. Riches are condemned out of hand by Christ, quite clearly, that the early church in Jerusalem

was a communalist collective. They lived together in one place. They counted nothing as their own. They had no private property. Now, you can understand historically why this would be a very difficult form of life to sustain, especially, you know, with the privations and difficulties of ancient culture or any culture. But it is explicitly there. I mean, it is central to Christ's preaching.

I've been attacked actually for writing articles that consist in little more than a container of verses drawn directly from the text by, you know, House theologians at places like the Acton Institute, which, you know, is a place that's sort of dedicated to trying to reconcile Christianity with libertarianism, which is, you know, about as hopeless a task as you can imagine. But that seems, that task seems to have been pretty successful in America. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, America is a great Gnostic adventure at the end of the day. I'm not sure Christianity will ever reach these shores, but if it does, it's going to find a very intractable people here. Very hard to convert. That's David Bentley Hart, whose translation of the New Testament was published by Yale University Press. He spoke with staff writer Vincent Cunningham.

Now, it's not often that we have two stories on the show that both involve ancient Greek, but, you know, you never know. This Christmas, thousands of you, possibly millions of you, are going to open a video game called Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Odyssey is the 11th of the Assassin's Creed games. Each one creates a highly detailed and realistic depiction of some place in the past, Renaissance Italy or the French Revolution in Paris, and you go there to kill people. The new game Odyssey takes place in 5th century BC Greece.

The radio hours Alex Barron went to check out Odyssey with a bona fide classicist, the New Yorker's Daniel Mendelsohn. Daniel is both a contributor to the magazine and a college professor at Bard who teaches the ancient Greek world. Gentlemen, start your PlayStation. I just want to kill everybody. Yeah, that's good. That's all the game wants you to do. When Assassin's Creed Odyssey came out in the fall, it got a lot of attention, and not just from the usual gamer circles, but from serious academics. I mean, I mean, people who really know a lot about the classical world got really excited both about the game's level of detail

and about its historical accuracy. Yes! No match for a Spartan. Daniel hadn't seen the game before, so I was very excited to be the one who got to show it to him and to see how authentic he thought it was. I'm curious, I mean, is this what the Battle of Thermopylae looked like? I thought the deal with the Spartans was that they fought in like a phalanx.

Well, I think probably after a while it starts to fall apart, you know, when the 8 million Persians are attacking the 300 Spartans at a certain point may be a cut formation. So in the game, you mostly play as this Greek mercenary. Mine's name is Cassandra. Cassandra wears the kind of leather and metal armor that you see in movies about ancient Greece. Sometimes she wears a helmet. Sometimes the helmet has that red brush thing on top of it. She's got whatever swords or spears or daggers you're currently using to fight with kind of strapped to her back.

And you guide her through ancient Greece, killing people, saving people, stealing things, and earning money and new weapons and experience points as you go. So I should say, I really like this game, and I know virtually nothing about classical history. Okay, well, I know a lot about classical history. classical history and virtually nothing about this game. So it looks like we're on match. Perfect. So at this point in the game, Cassandra is on the trail of this mysterious, nefarious cult, which has taken us to the Temple of Apollo, which is where the Oracle sat in Delphi.

Oh, well, Delphi is incredibly cool. So here's the Temple of Apollo. Okay. looking good. All that stuff around is very true to life. The setting, if you ever go to Delphi, it's the most insanely dramatic

setting. The site is located on this sort of bluff overlooking a valley, the valley where Edipus ran into his father by mistake. This valley? Yeah. Yeah. It's truly numinous. I mean, you feel that there's something supernatural

there. You really do. I'm not a crazy person. Daniel's excited not just to visit some of the ancient sites, but to rub elbows with some of the ancient celebrities that show up in the game. Is that Herodotus? I'm dying to meet Herodotus. Where is that guy? It's funny because they're all speaking ancient Greek in the background with modern Greek accents.

What is the difference? That's a huge difference. If you listen to Reconstructions of ancient Greek, it sounds more like Chinese than like modern Greek. I'm slightly worried that we're going to have to kill all these people. Okay, is that Herodotus? Yes. How do I look? Terrifying.

Good. Keep your wits about you. Try not to do anything rash. I'm a little disappointed that, you know, if this Herodotus is Herodotus, a historian, you would want him to offer more sage maxims about history and fate. He's like a kind of a tour guide on a B-level cruise, you know, definitely. Beriglis surrounds himself with the brightest minds in Athens, which is to say anyway. Let's go to Athens.

In Athens, you can fulfill your duty to your family. So now we're riding to Athens. Let's go. I won't spend a summer on Mount Pileon, which in myth is the place that Jason set off from with the Argonauts. that looks just like this. So you tell me, Daniel, like, where, what is an interesting thing in Athens for us to try to find? Well, I think at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the Acropolis is just a finishing. I mean, it's not even totally finished.

Oh, boy. Killing three of these guys at the same time might be a bit of a challenge, but, all right, let's get out of here. This has been fun. The winning strategy for fighting in this game, it turns out, is to hide. Well, that's very Pericles in. The famous Acropolis, a testament to humankind's skill and craftsmanship. So now we're on the Acropolis. Yeah.

There would have been statues all over the play, dedications, politicians, victorious athletes. It was not when you go there now. There's just the Parthenon and a couple of things. Yeah, it's one of the things about this game that I really love. There is something that is weirdly evocative just in seeing people next to these, next to representation. You're not used to that. The other thing I like is I noticed some scaffolding along some of the buildings, because the Acropolis was not quite finished.

If can you, let's see, can you angle up so we can look up at the top of it? Okay, so that giant, that's a giant bronze statue, which was Athena specifically, in her military aspect, right? Which is also, you know, it's the first thing you see as you go on the Parthenon, you know, it's basically saying don't fuck with us. And this, I think, was about 38, 40 feet high. And that does not still stand.

No, no, no. Because bronze things can't. You know, became arrowheads and bullets 1,500 years ago. Should we try to climb her real fast? Well, it would be interesting to see what the view is, and you seem to be a very good, climbing up a she wall of bronze with your spidey sticky palms.

Wow. This is legitimately, I find very stirring to do. The notion of climbing down this 40 foot tall bronze statue that no longer exists, that would have been, I mean, this is the kind of thing that if you saw it today, you would be, that would be incredibly impressive. They were meant to be impressive. Look, you never know what's going to get people interested in this civilization. You know, a whole generation of Latinists came out of that movie Gladiator. So it was a wonderful classicist called Jack Winkler. And I can't remember which article he wrote in which he started out by, you know, basically saying, you know, why do you get interested in the classics?

naughty myths and naked statues, you know. I mean, who cares, you know? So if it's a video game, I have no problem with that. Daniel Mendelsohn playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey with the radio hours Alex Barron. It's like book 16 of the Iliad where the bloodlust takes over. Then the next thing you know,

if you've missed your appointment with your student advisee, because all you want is person blood on your head. If you spend your holiday playing video games, please kill wisely. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for this week. Special thanks this week to our musical guest, Kirk Douglas, and I hope you and yours have a great, great holiday. Please join us next week for the New Yorker Radio Hour. Till then.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Two New Yorker. yards, the New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turinette Endowment Fund. Something like that.