John Diliberto

John Diliberto is a nationally published writer and award-winning radio producer who has been exploring and exposing new music on the radio, in print and online since 1974. He currently is the host and executive producer of Echoes, a nightly music soundscape on Public Radio International, and heard on public radio stations across the country.
Diliberto grew up in Massachusetts. A child of the British invasion, the first music Diliberto embraced was by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Kinks and The Zombies. His first concert was the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Soft Machine and The Eire Apparent at the Framingham Music Tent in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1968. Inspired by Jethro Tull and The Blues Project, Diliberto began playing flute in 9th grade. He had to give up his lessons because the marching band conflicted with football, but he kept playing on his own. Football got him a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he was a DJ on the university-owned public radio station WXPN. In 1975-6 he created Star's End, an ambient radio show that is still on the air.
Diliberto was a member of a short-lived band known as The Spontaneous Creation Space Music Ensemble, which was, in his words, "A jam band put together by DJs on the airwaves of WXPN in the 1970s."
Upon leaving Penn in 1976, Diliberto worked in various record stores while starting to write for the local alternative paper The Drummer under editor David Fricke, who has written and edited for Rolling Stone. In 1979 he began writing reviews for Audio magazine. In 1980 he ventured to California where he was Program Director of University of California, Berkeley's KALX.
In 1981 Diliberto returned to Philadelphia, where he continued hosting shows at WXPN and began producing programs for national distribution. The first was a five-part series on the electronic underground called Electronic Minstrels. These half-hour documentaries included David Borden, Helen Thorington, Woz (not THAT Woz), The Ghostwriters and Michael William Gilbert.
Then came Totally Wired, a weekly documentary focusing on artists working at the cutting edges of music. Some of the highlights included location interviews with John Cage, Brian Eno, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tangerine Dream, Kate Bush, Klaus Schulze, Robert Fripp, Keith Jarrett, Vangelis, Wendy Carlos and Steve Roach. In all, 122 Totally Wired episodes were produced from 1982-1989. It won The Major Armstrong Award, The Ohio State Award, and the National Federation of Community Broadcasters Golden Reel Award.
Totally Wired ended when Diliberto teamed up with WXPN's Kimberly Haas to create Echoes in October, 1989. On Echoes, Diliberto is the executive producer and host. He oversees the selection of music on the program, conducts, produces and writes most of the interview features. Echoes' Living Room Concerts series has included Sheila Chandra in her Glastonbury cottage, Mark Isham, in his Los Angeles home, Pat Metheny, Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, and George Winston playing in Diliberto's living room. On Echoes, Diliberto has interviewed Brian Eno, Enya, Laurie Anderson, and Peter Gabriel.
In the late 90s and into the new millennium Diliberto produced 12 documentaries for NPR’s Jazz Profiles, including a two-part program on John Coltrane that was part of the Jazz Profiles Peabody Award Winning submission in 2001.
Diliberto's reviews and features have appeared in Musician, Billboard, Down Beat, Jazziz, Pulse, Audio, CD Review, Music Technology, Electronic Musician, Mix, and other publications.
Diliberto has also worked on a several albums. Besides the Echoes Living Room Concerts CDs, he compiled and wrote liner notes for MBNT: A Recollection of Proto-ambient Music from Hearts of Space (Hearts of Space), wrote liner notes for A Quiet Revolution: 30 Years of Windham Hill, The Big Bang (Ellipsis Arts), Musique Mechanique (Celestial Harmonies), Shadows and Light (Deutsche Grammophon), Planet Soup (Ellipsis Arts), and Sun Ra’s Lanquidity (Evidence) and Afro Celt Sound System’s Capture: 1995-2010 (Real World).
Diliberto resides in Chester County, Pennsylvania.