/Audio by Adam/

Radio and Audio Features and Documentaries

Author: Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips has been a radio features journalist and audio documentarist and oral historian since 1986, both as public radio freelancer and, since 1993, as a career journalist at the Voice of America. Adam has won nearly twenty international, national and in-house awards for his work, which highlights the experiences and realities of everyday people with extraordinary stores to tell, and which makes extensive use of found sound and music to create a “theater of the mind.” Adam teaches Audio Documentary Making at the New School’s Graduate School of Media Studies, and Oral History at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. His combines his lifelong interests in mythology, theater and community building in his celebrancy practice, which uses ceremonies to mark life’s milestones and the processes of nature. Adam was ‘born, bred and buttered’ in New York City.

Zabar’s Appetizing: America’s Premier Deli

What New Yorker does not get misty-eyed at the sound of Zabar’s tastings, especially the nova counter, and all that goes with it? Instead of just idly asking, I went there, and talked to people about it. I got a lot wiser, and more than a mite fatter from the experience.

Yiddish in Mainstream American Speech

Oy! There are so many Yiddish words Americans (and Noo Yawkuz especially) use in everyday talking that it is really gevalt. This is a VOA Wordmaster segment where I explore what some of those words are and what they mean. Originally tailored for broadcast to places where Yiddish has never never been heard.

Small’s “Old School” Jazz Club in the Village

From the mid-1930s until the early 1960s, jazz was one of the nation’s most popular styles of music. Rock and roll and other genres ultimately eclipsed jazz’s mainstream appeal. But there is a place in New York City where one can still experience the spirit, the inventiveness and the community that was jazz in its […]

“Black Gotham” 19th Century African American New York

(Credit: Museum of African American History)

While many Americans are familiar with black slavery in the South, and its role in igniting one of the 19th century’s most brutal wars, less attention has been paid to the black experience in Northern cities like New York where many ex-slaves and “freedmen” lived. A new book, Black Gotham by Carla Peterson, sheds some […]

Greenwich Village Chess Culture

It may have been even more true in the beatnik era, but chess continues to be the national sport of Greenwich Village. This is a feature about one of the last remaining late night chess parlors in the city, and its habitues.

The American Search for Spirituality

Americans are searches, pioneers, restless, and often lonely for spiritual refreshment and a path. This 20 minute mini-doc explores some various faces of these urges.