Drivetime Classics host Jason Heilman is glad to be back in Wisconsin and on the air with Wisconsin Public Radio. A native Wisconsinite, Jason was born in Plymouth and spent his earliest years in the village of Waldo before moving with his family to Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was in Tulsa that he first learned the trumpet and eventually began playing professionally, earning his bachelor’s degree in trumpet performance from the University of Tulsa.
It was a desire to know more about why European music developed the way it did that led Jason to go into the field of musicology, the study of music in its historical context. He received his master’s degree in music history from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. in musicology and European studies from Duke University. While he was researching his dissertation, Jason lived in Vienna for a year and a half. Officially, he was there as an invited fellow at the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies, but in reality, he spent most of his time attending concerts and sampling the city’s finest bratwurst and kebab stands.
Jason has taught at Duke and at the University of Texas at Austin, but his real calling is inspiring people to experience music firsthand. In 2010, Jason co-founded the chamber ensemble Tulsa Camerata, where he emceed the concerts and served as its executive director. When the group commissioned Michael Daugherty’s This Land Sings: Songs of Wandering, Love, and Protest Inspired by the Life and Times of Woody Guthrie, Jason wrote the narrator’s part, in the style of an old-time radio broadcast, and performed it at the world premiere in April 2016. This foreshadowed his move into radio, when he started hosting Classical Tulsa for Public Radio Tulsa in 2017.
In addition to hosting Drivetime Classics on WPR Music, Jason lectures and writes for concerts all over the United States. He met his wife, Rosalyn, when they were both sixth graders and they reunited and got married twenty-five years later. Together, they’ve been enjoying getting to know Milwaukee and experiencing all the great things it has to offer. Jason’s main passions in life are music, beer, and coffee, and he doesn’t consider a day complete without all three.
