KSDS FM: Mouse That Grooves Soon May Roar

Two a.m. The cool of the night settles on the city, and hard-core jazz aficionados are kicking back, hitting a groove on a soft sound that swings out of radio station KSDS FM (88.3).

In the dim light of the station’s air booth, “The Creeper,” a.k.a. Derek Hunter, cues up a 1955 recording of “Night and Day” by Anita O’Day. Soon, O’Day’s playful scatting is out there, soothing the ears of wee-hour listeners, and all is jake on Basin Street and San Diego Bay.

Situated on the campus of San Diego City College, KSDS is the voice and mainstay of San Diego’s evolving jazz scene. Jazz at KSDS is played with an almost religious intensity 24 hours a day by the station’s 53 student and volunteer deejays.

Not a throbbing, almighty, megawatt voice, KSDS broadcasts on a shoestring budget with a faint 830 watts. It’s a weak signal that fans regretfully acknowledge tends to fade in and out among San Diego County’s hills and canyons.

If a test later this month proves successful, the station may embark on a $75,000 to $85,000 improvement to install microwave equipment, raise the height of its antenna 50 feet, and boost its power to 3,000 watts, thus strengthening its signal and more than doubling the station’s reach, said chief engineer Larry Quick.

Meanwhile, the small public radio station has gained a mighty profile in the jazz community.

“KSDS is the cornerstone of jazz in San Diego,” said Mike Wofford, an internationally noted jazz pianist who lives and sometimes works in San Diego.

Wofford praised KSDS not only for playing a jazz spectrum that ranges from Dixieland to the best contemporary compositions, but for assuming the role of the city’s jazz clearing house. If you want to know where to hear live jazz in San Diego, KSDS will tell you that and plenty more.

The station broadcasts its own series of monthly live concerts, weekly interviews featuring local and national jazz artists, and a comprehensive calendar of jazz events. It also sends its deejays to be hosts of a variety of concerts.

The station gives air play primarily to mainstream jazz played on acoustic instruments, with an emphasis on the jazz classics. What listeners won’t hear at KSDS, which is owned and operated by the San Diego Community College District, is much fusion jazz, dubbed “elevator jazz” and “fuzak” by most of the deejays at the station. Programming is a matter of pride at KSDS.

“We don’t program the four-by-four beat-box Jacuzzi jazz,” said program director Tony Sisti. “We don’t want people to say, ‘Yeah, I listen to them when I’m reading or in the Jacuzzi.’ ”

Fusion is played sufficiently elsewhere on commercial radio stations such as KIFM (98.1), he said. KSDS plays the unadulterated, straight-ahead, real thing, say local jazz buffs.

Stanley Dance, an internationally renowned jazz critic who has made guest appearances on KSDS, praised the station, contrasting its programming with the more popular fusion programming of a station such as KIFM.

“They (KSDS) play real jazz, whereas the other station plays pop music,” Dance said. “I certainly don’t like a lot of the modern forms, but they are certainly jazz. But this new-age fusion music is pop music masquerading as jazz. I think what they’re (KIFM) doing is a joke.”

To Sisti, jazz clearly isn’t pop. It requires active listening.

“You want to create a response,” he said in his understated announcer’s voice. “Like ‘Yeah, that was a great track. Did you hear that sax solo?’ We want to offer something that stimulates them.”

Sisti, a former jazz drummer who began drum lessons at the age of 5, has introduced a strict format requiring deejays to play pieces from eight distinct jazz categories each hour, including mainstream, classic, vocal, big band, current traditional and fusion. Fusion, which many traditional jazz lovers refuse to call jazz, is limited to 10 minutes per hour.

“I’m not the one that dismisses contemporary music,” Sisti said. “To say there is no value in contemporary music is wrong.”

However, he combs through the contemporary albums carefully, and dismisses most of the music as inferior.

“If anybody has to take the rap for not playing David Sanborn or Spyro Gyra, it’s me,” he said. “There’s definitely artists out there that create technically challenging facets of (contemporary) jazz: Joe Zawinul . . . Andy Sheppard . . . And there’s a tremendous saxophone quartet from England called Itchy Fingers. Technically, they’re very challenging and very good.”

Besides the regular hourly cycle, KSDS offers 16 special programs featuring blues, live concerts, a program on jazz rhythms around the world, Dixieland and swing, vocalists, guitarists, the earliest jazz recordings and new-age music.

“We’ll try new-age,” said Phyllis Hegeman, the station’s music and public affairs director. “We can’t reject it. People said be-bop was not jazz in the 1950s. Maybe in 20 years, new-age will be jazz.”

KSDS debuted in 1951 as FM 91.6 and changed its frequency to 88.3 in 1952. It originally featured a pop, jazz and classical format, but shifted to jazz in 1973.

“We thought jazz was particularly appropriate because we are an urban campus with a widely divergent ethnic community,” said Hope Shaw, station manager and head of the school’s telecommunications department. “It seemed jazz was a wonderful and perfect music for us to do. It legitimately allows for such a very wide range of music . . . and it allows the students to work in a real, professional format. We also felt there was no jazz station in town.”

Although other public and commercial radio stations experimented with jazz over the decades, for all practical purposes the format had been abandoned, and only KSDS carried it by the early 1980s.

“I think it’s a simple matter of economics,” said Doug Oliver, Channel 8 weatherman and a former jazz deejay.

Rock music superseded jazz in popularity, he said.

Jazz musicians were partly to blame for jazz’s demise, said announcer Rod Page, who hosted a popular nighttime jazz program in 1962 on KFMB FM. Forced to write for the three-minute singles format, the musicians revolted with the advent of long-playing records, he said.

“When the long-play format came out, somebody like Miles (Davis) would blow 33 choruses, and maybe it’d be bad. People began to not play for an audience. They said, ‘You come worship in my temple. I am the hip ruler . . . ‘ They alienated a lot of people.”

Regardless of what happened in the 1960s, jazz in general--and at KSDS in particular--has gained a growing audience, many say.

“We get a lot of people calling who say, ‘I just moved into town and, wow, this is great,’ or ‘Love this station. It’s the only one in town,’ ” said Hegeman. “We get absolute jazz nuts calling. They want to talk your ear off about jazz. They are just total jazz fiends.”

Hegeman said that KSDS’ public mission as a training ground for students in broadcast journalism has contributed to its success in its support of jazz.

“We don’t have a (commercial) interest as a station,” she said. “That’s what’s so beautiful about this station. KSDS is a pure source of support for jazz in San Diego.”