‘Radiolab’ co-host Jad Abumrad bringing music and more to Santa Rosa show

Many people who listen to radio shows feel an intimate connection to their hosts, which has led to the phenomenon of doing versions of the shows live on stage.

This Saturday, “Radiolab” host Jad Abumrad will team up with Camp Meeker cellist Zoë Keating to tell the story of the show at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.

“Radiolab” launched almost 15 years ago at New York public radio station WNYC and now is on more than 500 stations across the country, including Rohnert Park-based KRCB and San Francisco’s KQED. Its podcasts are downloaded more than 5 million times a month.

The show is propelled by the inquisitiveness of its hosts, Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, a veteran reporter whose voice reminds one of Burgess Meredith’s.

“Radiolab” takes on topics from philosophy to science, with a recent episode, “Playing God,” about triage, including a segment about how a hospital staff in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina chose whom to save.

A spinoff, the NPR podcast “More Perfect,” looks into how Supreme Court decisions affect our daily lives.

A trained composer and MacArthur Fellow (a “genius grants” recipient), Abumrad uses music to enhance the emotional content of his show. After listening for a while you realize that the hosts’ voices are part of Radiolab’s orchestra.

Keating and Abumrad first collaborated in 2008. “He visited me in San Francisco and recorded a podcast where I talk through the creation of a live song.” Keating said. “I have so many fans who tell me that’s how they discovered me and I’m eternally grateful.”

Next Abumrad invited Keating to be part of the live “Radiolab” show when it debuted on stage. Abumrad sends her a script, and before the show they review the cues but don’t rehearse.

“I think we work best when it’s kind of seat of the pants,” Keating said. “I know (hopefully) where I’m supposed to make live music in the show, but it’s going to be different every time.”

Before launching “Radiolab,” Abumrad and Krulwich tried to break through with a two-minute piece for Ira Glass’s show “This American Life.”

“It was horrible, really horrible,” Glass said during a 2008 “Radiolab” episode. “It’s just amazing you were able to put together such a wonderful program after that.”

During a 30-minute phone interview, Abumrad, 43, discussed the process of making the show and what the LBC audience can expect. Here are the highlights.

Q. What do you and Keating have planned for the show?

A. What they are going to see is something that feels like a “Radiolab” show, with me talking personally about the history of the show … as filtered through all of these interviews that I’ve done about creativity, from poker players to a Cherokee shaman to composers to psychotherapists to musicologists.

There will be original animations, music I’ve composed, music Zoe will be composing in the moment, and there’ll be some live demonstrations of how we do what we do.

It’s a Radiolab-ish episode about the process of navigating uncertainty when you’re trying to make something.

Q. Are you concerned that pulling back the curtain will expose the wizard?

A. There’s always that slight gasp that happens when you walk on stage. People who know your voice (have) a little bit of discomfort when they suddenly have to embody the disembodied voice. It’s such a cognitive dissonance moment. But I want it to be as intimate and as dreamlike as the show, and I’ve worked really hard to make it that way.

Q. How do you use music to add emotional texture to the show?

A. I come to the show as a musician more than anything, maybe a failed musician, who is secretly trying to resurrect his musical soul from within the show. Since the time I was 5, I wanted to be a musician.

I had pretty much decided that I had given the music thing a shot and it just wasn’t working out, so I was in a little bit of a what-do-I-do-with-my-life moment, and a friend suggested I try radio. Somewhere along the way I just kind of realized it’s a deeply musical act. Someone telling a story on the radio is a little bit like performing and composing music.

When you’re talking, one of the first things you have to grapple with is: How do I speak something into the microphone in a way that’s compelling, and it’s also me.

You have to pick your voice up, bring it down, sort of syncopate it. When you’re really trying to say something meaningful your voice gets quiet. And when you’re trying to be forceful your voice gets kind of staccato with a little bit of an edgy timbre to it.

You’re dealing with pitch, dealing with rhythm, dealing with meter, and these are all deeply musical acts.

Q. How do you view your role in making the show?

A. It’s like being a composer. I studied composition in school (Oberlin College in Ohio), and that is the thing that still feels to me closest to my soul.

When you’re putting the show together, after you’ve done all the interviews, you’re staring at Pro Tools (an editing program), and you’ve got all these tracks top to bottom on your screen. All this sort of tape that you gathered exists as these little blocks.

I’m always struck by the fact that the screen looks a lot like a music score. It looks a whole lot like 16th-century counterpoint, like what Bach had to deal with. He had alto, tenor, soprano, bass.

There are these rigorous rules you have to sort of keep intact that govern how the voices should move.

And within that you’re trying to make something that’s beautiful, that makes the heart sing. We’re trying to do the same thing when we’re editing the show.

Q. Public radio is the ideal home for your show, but are there things you want to do but can’t?

A. I really enjoy taking the forms that we work with and pushing against them and seeing how far they can bend before they break. I’d really like to put an 11-minute music tale in the story.

I remember once at three in the morning, I threw one in. And Soren, who I work with, was like, “Dude, come on, you can’t do that.”

Q. Do you feel pressure to keep experimenting and innovating?

A. We expect that of ourselves; I kind of feel like the worst thing we could do is the thing that everyone thinks of as us.

Mostly, I feel like we can do what we want - it might suck but I think that’s OK as long as we’re trying stuff.

We need to be constantly reinventing ourselves. One of the questions I keep asking is: Are we scaring ourselves enough - are we scaring our audiences enough?

So reinvention isn’t just something we like to do - it’s something we have to do in order to survive.