Fred Boak played Terry Riley’s “Descending Moonshine Dervishes” one deep-winter Wednesday night on his WOMR radio show Out There. Riley’s intricate 1975 recording on the organ, which could be considered jazz or ambient music, is arresting. It lasts 45 minutes and features a looping delay Riley called a “time-lag accumulator.”
DJ Fred, as Boak is known on the air, has eccentric tastes. He recently played the song “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” from Mary Poppins, performed by Sun Ra, and he injects spirituality into the Outer Cape’s mostly secular Sundays during his Gospel Brunch Hour. He plays songs you want to share with friends, which is what Boak feels when he’s in the DJ booth. “I’m trying to be the listener’s friend,” he says. “I’m not trying to explain the music. I’m like, ‘Did you hear that?’ ”
Out There features jazz, loosely defined, on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month from 9 p.m. to midnight. Boak’s Omnipop Omnibus, on alternate Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m., features a wide range of music and begins with Gospel Brunch Hour.
Boak sings with the Chandler Travis Philharmonic, a nine-person ensemble, and the Three-O, a smaller group of Philharmonic musicians. The roles of DJ and performer “inform each other,” he says. “They both satisfy that itch of being able to share all kinds of music.” Boak often performs wearing pajama pants and sporting a red plastic vuvuzela horn. He describes the Philharmonic’s music as “omnipop,” “alternative Dixieland,” and “gospel music for atheists.”
Offstage, Boak lives a quiet life working remotely as a computer programmer from the home in Orleans he shares with his “sweetheart,” Naomi Rush. The two also share an affinity for art collecting (described in a December 2024 article in the Independent.)
Boak moved to the Cape from Boston in 2000 with his then-wife when it looked like their Coolidge Corner apartment was going to go condo. He had his eye on the Maine coast, but after visiting the Outer Cape and seeing a performance at the Beachcomber by the Incredible Casuals (another Chandler Travis band), he realized the Cape had more to offer than the “craziness” he associated with his visits to Hyannis. Boak began regularly performing with Travis in 2004 after hanging around the band long enough to be assigned to sell merch.
Boak was recruited to join the WOMR board in 2012. He hadn’t DJed since the 1980s — he did a few graveyard shifts at the Marist College station while he was home from M.I.T., where he was a student, and bristled at requirements to play Top 40. Answering phones during a WOMR pledge drive in 2015, he started to imagine his own show.
That became the Gospel Brunch Hour. Boak kicks off his Sunday shows with “Son of a Preacher Man,” the 1969 song by Dusty Springfield. It’s a nod to Boak’s background: his father was a minister at Freedom Plains Presbyterian Church in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Boak grew up. Boak sang in the choir, but it wasn’t gospel. “Once in a while, we’d sing an old spiritual,” he says, “but we’d be very white about it.” It wasn’t until the early days of CDs, when a Mahalia Jackson reissue caught his ear, that he began listening to gospel music. He moved on to the Holmes Brothers and started listening to the long-running radio show Sinner’s Crossroads, billed as “homemade congregational tapes and vintage commercial gospel throw-downs, a little preachin’, a little salvation, a little audio tomfoolery” on the New York City and Hudson Valley station WFMU.
Identifying somewhere between “lapsed Christian” and “secular humanist,” Boak says he’s drawn more to the positive message of gospel music than its religiosity. “There’s something about the message of love and peace that’s special,” he says.
The rest of Boak’s Sunday program is “omnipop” or “pan-rock and roll,” recalling the rock stations he listened to growing up in the Hudson Valley, like WPDH. “It was the mid-to-late-’70s FM heyday,” he says. “Tom Waits and the Roches and Peter Gabriel and Genesis and Led Zeppelin and the Beatles. Everything got played.”
He credits the band NRBQ with the term “omnipop,” describing their own broad-ranging sound. “Omnibus,” he says, is an invitation to “get on the bus.”
Boak’s other show, Out There, evolved from a modern jazz show, Miles to Go, that had the same time slot. Boak filled in occasionally, and when the slot opened up, he put in a request for his own show with his own spin in a more avant-garde direction.
Boak also credits NRBQ with introducing him to avant-garde music. He’d been a fan of the band for years but started going to more of their shows in the 1990s. “They sort of took things to another level,” he says.
One of Boak’s favorite things about being a DJ is the way that it leads him to find music he hasn’t heard before. He guesses that he spends about as many hours preparing for each program as he spends on the air, searching for new music and combing through his collection for topical songs.
“I’ll come up with some silly theme, and I’ll go through my collection and find every song that relates to that,” he says. “I did a half hour of music about breathing and air. I hope it opens my listeners’ ears.”
