With Chuck Niles, It’s Straight Ahead for Jazz : The man with the mellow voice doesn’t just play records; he lives the music that is America’s indigenous art

Famed drummer Art Blakey ends each of his performances by remarking that jazz is America’s only indigenous art form and saying how important it is that the members of the audience inform their friends and associates of its value.

Chuck Niles, whom most people in jazz know as the man with the mellow, foghornish voice who plays jazz records on KKGO-FM (105.1), is just as ardent as Blakey in his love of his chosen music.

Not only does Niles, a Malibu resident and a former musician and actor, play jazz on the radio, he regularly steps out and emcees jazz concerts--he’s in front of the mike every Tuesday at the downtown Biltmore Hotel’s Grand Avenue Bar--and usually winds up his evenings at this haunt or that, digging still more sounds.

“To boil it down to a simple phrase, it’s where it’s at for me,” Niles said, explaining his passion for improvised jazz music. “I still get thrills when I hear someone that can really play his instrument well. Also, I like to hang out. I know it sounds terribly corny, sort of like a Ralph Edwards production, but this is my life. And since I wasn’t really that good myself, I’m probably in awe of anybody who can play really well.”

Niles, a native of Springfield, Mass., started clarinet lessons at age 7 and later added saxophone. While a psychology and sociology undergraduate at American International College in Springfield in the late 1940s, he played a lot, sometimes working as much as six nights a week.

“It was wonderful,” he said, beaming. “I was making a lot of money and living at home. You see, there was no rock then. It was, quote unquote, our kind of music. You know, standards and so on.”

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Niles sees a lifelong affection for jazz as one way of finding the fountain of youth, or a reasonable approximation. “My kind of music makes me feel young,” he said with a soft smile. “I don’t know that I see it as nostalgia, or if it’s just quality music. I mean, do I like the great popular standards and jazz tunes because they bring back memories, or do I really like the way a tune is written, that it makes sense melodically, harmonically, lyrically? You can apply this with Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Ellington, so many others.”

If Niles had his way, he’d reverse what he calls “the demise of American music.”

“The educational process” is responsible for jazz’s “getting short shrift,” he said over a meal at a Westside delicatessen, “and if I were dictator, everybody would be required to be introduced to this abstract musical art.”

Shifting suddenly into a jesting tone, Niles added that “the way it is now, with this lack of attention,” jazz fans could become elitist. “I can walk around with my nose in the air. And if everybody dug jazz . . . then I would lose my snobbishness, and I’d be very disappointed. The way things are at least gives me something to complain about. It’s like the song title, I’m ‘Glad to Be Unhappy.’ ”

Niles has been at KKGO for almost 25 years and is heard Monday, Wednesday through Friday, and a very occasional Saturday from 6 to 10 p.m. He follows the station’s standard format--which leans toward contemporary, or fusion-oriented jazz--except from 9 to 10 each weeknight. During that hour, Niles’ shows feature a mainstream set he calls “Jazz Straight Ahead.”

He said his job offers two rewards. “It’s an opportunity and a privilege to play what I regard as good jazz music on the air. I especially appreciate the 9 to 10 hour. It reminds me, in quotes, of the old days, to some extent. Also, radio is satisfying from an ego point of view, and I still have one of those.”

Niles, 61, who happily quipped that his calendar in June is so full of emcee engagements that “it looks like somebody spilled ink on it,” said his ego also gets a workout in front of a live audience at a jazz event.

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“I guess I’m a ham,” he said with a smile, taking a drag on a cigarette. “I like to get up in front of people, and I feel very comfortable with jazz because, since I used to be a player, maybe I have a little bit of an inside feeling about what’s happening.”

Niles will be the man at the mike for Jazz Mobile West concerts, in which a quintet featuring trumpeter Al Aarons and saxophonist Herman Riley will appear on a portable stage at various locations around Los Angeles. The series of free shows is presented by the Los Angeles Jazz Society, with the help of grants from the city’s Cultural Affairs Department and the Musicians Performance Trust Fund, Local 47.

For Niles, the concerts recall an earlier Southland jazzmobile, which was patterned after the original jazzmobile project--founded by pianist Billy Taylor in New York in 1965 and still in existence.

“I did one in the late ‘60s. With help from Hamm’s Beer and other sponsors, Saul Levine and I rented a flatbed truck,” he said, referring to the man who is president of what was then KBCA and is now KKGO. “We used a sound system I had, and we got players to play all over. We did lunch breaks at colleges, even a gig at a tire shop with Red Holloway and Jimmy Witherspoon. I remember the same band played at USC and UCLA. On one show, John Klemmer played at the Mid-town shopping center. I drove and got to be a pretty good truck driver, but this time we’ll be using the city’s bandwagon.”

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Jazz Mobile West shows are scheduled for today at 1 p.m. at the West Los Angeles Civic Center on Santa Monica Boulevard and next Sunday at noon at Point Fermin Park in San Pedro. Niles will also appear as emcee when division winners of the Western States Jazz Festival--competing for a chance to play in the Playboy Jazz Festival, held at the Hollywood Bowl on June 17 and 18--perform at the Fiesta de las Artes, at the foot of Pier Avenue, Hermosa Beach, tomorrow at 1 p.m. “This will be my sixth or seventh year at the beach, and it’s always a lot of fun. The audience is right there in my lap,” he said.

Niles got involved in radio during his college days, in 1950, when he found out that “radio was fun.” His new career in broadcasting eventually included stints in the early ‘50s as a disk jockey in Daytona Beach, Fla., and as a deejay and TV sports reporter in West Palm Beach.

On arriving in Los Angeles in 1956, Niles--who had earlier changed his name from Neidel because “I was so tired of getting it mispronounced--’Needle,’ ‘Ny-dell’, ‘Noodle,’ ‘Niddle’ “--was almost immediately hired as the afternoon movie host on KHJ-TV.

Soon thereafter, he switched to radio, joining the crew at KFOX-AM (where Jim Gosa, his longtime KKGO colleague, was already ensconced) and in January, 1957, moved to KNOB-FM, the world’s first 24-hour jazz station.

In the late ‘50s, Niles began to devote time to acting, appearing both in low-budget films--”Teen-age Zombies,” “Hand of Death” and “Terror Circus” (recently released on video as “Barn of the Naked Dead”) are among the more memorable titles--and on stage, particularly at The Masquers, a private Equity-Waiver theater in Hollywood. There Niles appeared in productions for 20 years, working with such actors as Fred Clark and Donna Jean Young.

In 1958, Niles went to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel to audition for summer stock. “It was an Equity company, and I got a part. I went up to Lake Shasta--there was an Equity theater there that attracted a lot of people from San Francisco--and one of the roles I got was Biff in ‘Death of a Salesman.’ Tom Tully, a hell of an actor, played Willie Loman. That was the thrill of my life, working with him.”

(Tully had been nominated for an Academy Award for his role as the captain whom Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg relieves in “The Caine Mutiny.”)

Asked why he didn’t pursue his acting career, which he said he “misses terribly,” Niles noted matter-of-factly: “I had a wife and a daughter, and I had a responsibility to them, which a steady job in radio took care of. You do what you have to do. In that situation, you just can’t live your life totally for yourself.”

Besides, he has his jazz. So, after 39 years in the broadcasting business, Niles has certainly come to terms with himself. “I guess I have the feeling that, like Popeye says, I am who I am.”