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Performers

Live Performances

Music is an important and integral part of a Joe Frank program. Joe worked tirelessly drafting a show and when half-finished, he’d play selected music in the background as he revised his script. He had a keen ear for what type of bass, drumlines, and looping melodies would aid his voice and serve the story.

When performing live, Joe hired many of the same musicians he’d known for decades. Beginning with the Wadsworth shows in 1998 and the band “Brazzaville,” Joe’s relationship with members of this group—both personal and professional—grew and deepened. During rehearsals, Joe had a unique ability to describe what he wanted with specificity, but mostly without words. It was both challenging and exhilarating for all involved.

Joe and the musicians, and later singers and dancers, shared the highest standard and respect for what could manifest onstage with a Joe Frank show.

Find out more about these performers. We also have music CDs from a few of these musicians for sale. All proceeds go to the musician.

Brazzaville & David Arthur Brown
Carolina Cerisola
Danny Frankel
David Ralicke
Ed Valfre
James Harrah
Judith Owen
Julie Christensen
Kenny Lyon
Lorca Hart
Tara Nicole Hughes

Reviews of Joe’s Work

"Frank wanders deeply into the unconscious, producing Dionysian stories with a fairy-tale intensity whose effect is often funny, disturbing and deeply memorable."

Salon Magazine

"I came upon Joe Frank's work by accident a number of years ago while driving to my home in the Napa Valley late at night. I couldn't believe the originality and sheer brilliance of what I was hearing. From that moment on I became a dedicated Joe Frank fan. Joe Frank's shows raise the most interesting and enduring questions in new and original ways and are consistently thought-provoking and very funny."

Francis Ford Coppola, filmmaker

"The perfect Joe Frank experience is driving down an unfamiliar highway alone at night. You turn on your radio and are greeted by a lush, resonant voice that lulls you into a seemingly simple tale of love: a man at an airport saying goodbye to his wife over the phone, which abruptly turns into a vision of betrayal, alienation and death - often from obscure disease - all brought about by some profound personal failing, which is redeemed at the last moment by a nearly transcendent moment of joy."

Salon

"[Joe Frank is] the most imaginative, literate monologist in radio today... If a microphone could capture the nether recesses of the modern psyche, it would sound like Frank's absurd comical excursions: Radio Vertigo."

The Village Voice

"Joe Frank is an original whose work has helped form some of the most eccentric, dark and interesting parts of public radio's personality. "

Terry Gross, Fresh Air

"Joe Frank's often bizarre scenarios for the mind are decidedly offbeat radio fare...part surreal satire, part bizarre meditation, part fever dream."

Los Angeles Daily News

"Joe Frank is an invaluable warrior who stands in defense of our fears, our vanities and our forever-eroding sense of ourselves. He transforms the everyday banality of the human comedy into an inspired weirdness that feeds on pathos and irony, and feels a lot like revelation. Sartre would have called it nausea; Frank makes it art."

Spin Magazine

"[Joe Frank] is one of the great, original radio performers. He's created a sound and style for himself - a complete aesthetic that's entirely his own. I first heard him when I was 19 and it changed everything for me. His work demonstrated the intensity and emotion that the medium is capable of; ingenious…fantastic."

Ira Glass, This American Life

"Although commonly categorized as radio drama, Frank's work bears very little resemblance to the stagy artifice of plays performed over air. Frank wanders deeply into the unconscious, producing Dionysian stories with a fairy-tale intensity whose effect is often funny, disturbing and deeply memorable."

Salon

"A strange, different, wondrously offbeat, frequently hilarious, altogether brilliant piece of work..There's never been anything quite like it...Joe Frank is an audio Fellini."

The Los Angeles Times