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Radio personalities join JPR celebration By BILL VARBLE Say the names -- Linda Wertheimer, Bill McGlaughlin, Vance Gilbert, Georges Collinet -- and it sounds like a party of National Public Radio types. Which is what it is, basically. Those NPR personalities are coming to the Rogue Valley for Jefferson Public Radio's 30th birthday party for itself. "We asked ourselves, `What are our core things?"' JPR development director Paul Westhelle says. "They're news, classical music, non-classical music. We looked at some of our longest running programs with the deepest roots in those areas." The events are in part fund-raisers for JPR. Westhelle says Scott Simon, Wertheimer's "All Things" colleague, agreed to come but had an emergency and had to cancel. He says tickets for Wertheimer's talk are moving the fastest, but at press time tickets remained for all events. McGlaughlin, the host of NPR's "St. Paul Sunday," kicks off events Friday when he joins the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Terra Nova Consort for an evening of Renaissance music at the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater in Medford. Singer-songwriter Vance Gilbert performs Saturday afternoon at the bandshell in Ashland's Lithia Park. Later that night, "Afropop Worldwide" host Georges Collinet rocks the Britt Ballroom at Southern Oregon University with world music dance tunes. Sunday at the Craterian, Linda Wertheimer presents a lecture. JPR started as KSOR, a 10-watt station in a basement on the Southern Oregon State College campus in Ashland. It's now a broadcasting mini-empire whose three separate services (Classics and News, Rhythm and News, News and Information) cover some 60,000 square miles from Klamath Falls to the Coast and from Roseburg into Northern California. McGlaughlin has hosted a Sunday morning classical music show on public radio for almost 20 years. He's heard locally on JPR's Classics and News Service. His show offers discussions with top musicians in addition to music. The Terra Nova Consort performs each year from June to October as part of the festival's green shows "on the bricks," in front of the festival's Elizabethan theater before plays. The Consort recently signed with the Dorian label for the group's debut CD, "Renaissance en Provence." The signing came after the label conducted an international search for new recording artists last year. You may have heard Vance Gilbert on JPR's "Open Air" this month. He's been getting a lot of play. Gilbert is a former jazz singer who emerged from the Boston folk scene to win the prestigious Kerrville folk festival's Vocalist of the Year award in 1997. His third album, "Shaking Off Gravity," is a stripped down, song-oriented outing that's pained, dark, determined and powerful, all at once. Among those lending guest tracks were singers Patty Larkin and Cliff Eberhardt. Wertheimer joined NPR in 1971 and covered the Congress and politics until she joined "All Things Considered" in 1989. She has covered presidential campaigns and conventions since 1976. `All Things Considered" is heard locally afternoons except on Sunday. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA