Sounds Like Home

The show is called "Sounds Like Home" because host Shelley Masar and her husband ran the University of Illinois campus jazz club, Nature's Table, from 1979-1991. Many of the young cats on "the Table" scene in the '80s have gone onto jazz careers in Chicago and New York and Shelley likes to honor the U.I./ Table lineage.

As a sometime poet and journalist, Shelley appreciates the insights of jazz writers like Neal Tesser and David Berliner and often reads from jazz tomes and liner notes ( This annoys some and informs others). She is ecclectic in her tastes and can veer from "out" to "soul", "vocal" to "extended" instrumental.

Her kid brother (pictured below), Chris Washburne, is a jazz trombonist playing, recording, and teaching in NY, NY. A published writer on Salsa and Latin jazz Washburne has informed his big sister's appreciation of the hard swing in trombone repertoire and the jazz in Latin Jazz.