R.I.P.: Bob Perkins, A Legend Of Jazz Radio at WRTI

Bob Perkins (1934-2025)

For Bob Perkins, making music was making magic. “That’s what a musician does, to me. When he or she stands up and takes a solo,” he said in 2020. “And it’s all coming out and improvised from the mind to the hand.”

There’s another kind of magic too — the kind woven by a warm voice, a lifetime’s worth of knowledge, and an irresistible passion for jazz. That was BP with the GM.

Perkins died in the early hours of Sunday at Jefferson Abington Hospital, where he had been hospitalized for the last two weeks. He was 91, and lived in Wyncote, PA.

His wife, Dr. Sheila K. Perkins, confirmed his death to WRTI.

Born in Philadelphia, Perkin began his broadcasting career in Detroit in 1964, before moving back to his hometown five years later to work for WDAS. He quickly became a regular on the city’s airwaves.

“One of the things that I thought was somewhat unique about his radio program back then was he never presented it as a jazz program,” saxophonist Larry McKenna, who first heard Perkins on WHYY in the late ‘80s, once told WRTI. (McKenna died in 2023, at 86.) “He played a lot of jazz, but he also mixed in people who were just his favorites.” As McKenna recalled, Perkins would play Doris Day or Dick Haymes alongside the likes of Miles Davis and Stan Getz.

His move to WRTI in 1997 introduced him to a new audience. “Bob Perkins always seemed like one of those voices that was omnipresent,” says bassist Christian McBride. “He carried a lot of history and he was a legacy unto himself, so he could play things and share things with the audience from a vantage point that most DJs don’t have.”