Symphony Sid

Sid Torin (born Sidney Tarnopol; December 14, 1909 – September 14, 1984), known professionally as "Symphony Sid", was a long-time jazz disc jockey in the United States.

Many critics have credited him with introducing bebop to a mass audience.

Sidney Tarnopol was born in New York City into a Jewish family.

According to the 1920 U.S. Census, his parents were Isidore (a printer) and Caroline, both Yiddish-speaking immigrants; his father was from Russia and his mother from Romania.

Sidney was the oldest of three siblings — he had a brother Martin and a sister Mildred.

Born on New York's Lower East Side, Sid grew up in Brooklyn, in a poor neighborhood.

Not much is known about his youth, although he seems to have become a jazz fan as a teenager, and at one point tried to become a trumpet player.

One source says he started college and then dropped out as a result of the Great Depression.

By 1930, the census showed him working at a record store.

He first got into radio in 1937, at a radio station in the Bronx at WBNX, where he began as an afternoon disc jockey, doing a show called the Afternoon Swing Session.

His show featured the biggest hits by black performers such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald.

He became extremely popular with young people, many of whom would come to the station hoping to meet him or make a request.

In an era when black music was still not frequently heard on the air, Symphony Sid was among the few white announcers who played what was then called "race" or "sepia" recordings on a regular basis.

In addition to being an announcer — in 1937, the word "disc jockey" was not yet in common use — Sid sold airtime for his own program and produced the commercials for his sponsors.

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The Deejays.

By 1941, Symphony Sid had left WBNX and was working at WHOM in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he became identified with doing the late night shift.

His show was called the After-Hours Swing Session.

At WHOM, he began to give emerging black performers exposure.

He also began to co-produce and promote jazz concerts, in association with Monte Kay.

One of their first collaborations was in 1945 (some sources say 1942) at New York's Town Hall; it featured Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

After WHOM, his career took him briefly to WWRL in New York and then to WMCA.

By 1947, he was one of the best known jazz disc jockeys, and airplay on his show could give a major boost to any musician.

Some grateful performers even wrote songs that they dedicated to him: for example, in 1947, Arnett Cobb recorded "Walkin' With Sid" for the Apollo label.

And also in 1947, Sid began to use a song by Erskine Hawkins, "After Hours", as the theme of his nightly program.

Sid left WMCA in early June 1949, but he didn't have to wait long for his next job.

On 20 June 1949, he received his biggest opportunity: a network program on what was then called WJZ—later known as WABC.

Thanks to his work on the fledgling ABC Radio Network, he could now be heard in more than 30 states.

And as a result of his network show, jazz, especially the music of artists like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, gained wider exposure with a national audience.

Later, critics would refer to him as "the dean of jazz radio".

In his 1957 novel On the Road, based on his travels across the United States in the late 1940's, Jack Kerouac wrote that as he approached New York City in his car he listened to the Symphony Sid show on the radio with the latest jazz.

Although Sid was white, he was known for his hipster lingo, his love of bebop, and his knowledge of the black music scene.

New York: Macmillan, 1971, p. 67.

The story of how he gained the nickname "Symphony" Sid has been told in multiple contradictory accounts.

According to one source, it came from working at the Symphony record store where he introduced R&B records.

The predominantly black customers told their friends that they bought the records from Symphony Sid.

But another source says it came from a sponsor—a men's clothing store, and when announcer Walter Tolmes opened Sid's show, he rhymed "Here comes the kid with the fancy pants and the fancy lid... Symphony Sid."

And yet another source says he got the name from playing "good music" (classical recordings) at his first radio job, before he became known for jazz.

This source says the name came from his playing symphonic music every day.

While modern critics later accused white jazz disc jockeys like Symphony Sid and Alan Freed of profiting from black radio and taking jobs away from black announcers (see Sinclair, 1989 for example), this did not seem to be a concern during the years when Sid broadcast.