KLON’s Power Play : Jazz Station’s Boost in Wattage Opens ‘New Era’

Ten years ago, when radio station KLON-FM discarded polka in favor of jazz, the reaction was swift and terrible.

The station, based at Cal State Long Beach, was lambasted with bomb threats, obscene phone calls and racist hate mail. Angry polka lovers wrote to their congressmen, the university president and the Federal Communications Commission, demanding the return of such polka greats as “Beer Barrel Polka” and “She’s Too Fat for Me.”

This month marks another milestone in the spunky station’s history. After six years of wrangling, a power increase has boosted the public radio station’s range, making it audible as far away as Palm Springs, San Diego and Ventura. The move is expected to roughly double the size of the audience. And combined with recent changes in the radio market that have made KLON the only remaining all-jazz station in Los Angeles County, programmers say, it is likely to result in the heretofore obscure station becoming something of a cultural icon.

“It feels like the dawning of a new era,” said Ken Borgers, program director. “It’s the real beginning of the radio station.”

By offering jazz lovers one of the few places on the Southern California radio dial (88.1 FM) where they can still feed their music habits, Borgers said, the nonprofit station expects to carry the banner for an art form that has fewer and fewer outlets despite its passionate and loyal following.

“(The power boost) will make a big difference to Southern Californians,” Borgers said, expressing an assessment shared by others in the field. “People have been hungering for this kind of music on the radio.”

Not bad for a station that began life as the voice of the Long Beach Unified School District, featuring such elementary-school favorites as “Adventures in Books,” “Singing Time,” and “Meet Mr. Make-Believe.”

It began quietly on Jan. 3, 1950, when KLON started broadcasting directly to the city’s classrooms and carrying a wide array of lessons, stories and songs. A whole generation of Long Beach residents grew up with memories of sitting at their elementary school desks listening to the booming voices from the big black boxes at the front of the classrooms. Some of the material eventually became so outdated that civics lessons referred to Ralph J. Bunche as the undersecretary of the United Nations well into the 1960s, even though he was promoted from that position in 1955.

But Proposition 13, Howard Jarvis’ 1978 tax-cutting initiative, put an end to all that. Realizing that its tightened budget could no longer afford KLON, the school district sold the station to Cal State Long Beach. By then, the programming had evolved into an eclectic mix of polka, opera and Portuguese music. In 1981 the station’s new management announced that it was switching to an all-jazz format, and listeners became angry.

KLON rode out the storm and gradually found a new audience. In 1986 the station dropped its affiliation with National Public Radio in favor of locally produced news inserts and what eventually became CALNET, a Long Beach-based news service for public radio stations throughout the state.

Jazz remained the focus, however. Then six months ago the county’s only other all-jazz station, KKJZ-AM, switched to classical music, leaving KLON alone in the field. KLON hired two of the station’s top disc jockeys, Sam Fields and well-known veteran Chuck Niles, thus setting the stage for its own emergence as the pre-eminent jazz station in Southern California.

The station’s disc jockeys, sounding cool and collected, spin their records 24 hours a day, interrupted only by occasional news breaks, interviews with musicians and a bit of mild patter.

“They treat jazz with respect but also with fun,” said Jude Hibler, publisher of Jazz Link, an internationally circulated jazz publication based in San Diego where, she says, KLON has already attracted lots of new fans. “Everybody connected with the station is superb and knowledgeable in the field of jazz.”

The power boost, which increased wattage from 1,200 to 8,000, had been in the works since 1985, according to Rick Lewis, the station’s general manager. Initial plans calling for an increase to 30,000 watts, he said, had to be scrapped following objections by KUCR, a non-jazz FM station based at UC Riverside. KUCR managers there believed that the proposed power boost would interfere with their own relatively weak signal. Eventually the problem was solved with an agreement that, in addition to calling for KLON to revise its plans, required KUCR to boost its own signal and switch frequencies.

Finally, on Feb. 1, with the FCC’s approval and a new transmitter constructed atop Signal Hill, singer Mel Torme appeared on campus to symbolically throw the switch opening a new era for the station.

Listeners reacted with immediate enthusiasm. In the days since then, according to Borgers, more than 800 of them in Southern California have called to comment on a signal that many said they couldn’t hear before.

“The sound is great,” gushed a jazz lover in Venice 25 miles to the north. “It’s the best thing that’s happened to us all year.”

Said a new fan from North Hollywood: “It’s great to have real music again.”

Before the KLON power boost, the station could be heard only in Long Beach, some parts of southern and western Los Angeles and northern Orange County.

The power boost is expected to double the station’s current weekly listener base of about 185,000, Lewis said. Some of the new listeners are also likely to join KLON’s roster of 9,500 dues-paying members, thus contributing to the station’s coffers.

“We see this as a move toward financial self-sufficiency,” Lewis said, adding that the $350,000 cost of the power boost is expected to be repaid through corporate, foundation and listener contributions. While the station, run on an annual budget of about $2.4 million, gets some support from the university, he said, it is increasingly supported by member contributions, grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and income from concert promotions and other fund-raisers.

“People in general are going to begin regarding KLON more seriously than they have in the past,” Lewis said, referring to the station’s status as a cultural entity worthy of financial support.

Some jazz aficionados already seem to be doing that.

“It will mean a lot to musicians and local clubs,” said Marla Gibbs, whose Marla’s Jazz Supper Club in Los Angeles has been a local institution under various names for 40 years. “The artists now have an outlet; it’s starting to make a difference.”

Said Hibler of Jazz Link: “I’m thrilled. This fills a void. I think KLON is one of the most significant radio stations in the United States for jazz.”

One indication of the station’s increased significance, said station manager Sharon Weissman, is the fact that it was recently invited to co-sponsor the upcoming Playboy Jazz Festival scheduled for the Hollywood Bowl June 15-16. In addition, she said, the station will be sponsoring the weekly Infinity Jazz at the Bowl series taking place this summer.

But the reception is still spotty in some areas.

C.O. Hytten, a listener in Sun Valley, wrote recently to tell KLON engineers that their signal was “coming in OK, but fuzzy and (with) static.” And a listener from Westwood left a message on the station’s answering machine, registering a complaint of an entirely different sort: “I’m glad jazz is back,” she said, “but it’s a little heavy for 6 in the morning.”