COVER STORY : Looking for some jazz? Then check out the town where all-jazz radio began and where Chuck Niles, the voice of jazz for 40 years, still holds forth today. It’s got hot nightclubs and cool sounds. It’s Long Beach, a city with plenty of . . . : Sax Appeal

Everybody knows jazz came up the river from New Orleans, but who would have figured it would end up in Long Beach?

It settled in other places, of course, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. But block for block, street for street, the harbor city has become a blues and jazz haven in its own right.

There are downtown clubs and North Long Beach bistros where the music sloshes out the doors on most evenings. The Queen Mary has been known to bob and sway to jazz rhythms emanating from its Observation Bar.

There’s even a bit of jazz broadcasting history in the Long Beach area. In 1956, Alex (Sleepy) Stein opened KNOB, the first all-jazz radio station in the world, in Signal Hill, the little city within the city of Long Beach.

Most noticeably nowadays, Long Beach has KLON, the Los Angeles area’s only all-jazz radio station. And Long Beach has Chuck Niles, the rumbling voice of jazz in Southern California for almost 40 years.

Niles, 67, a tall, angular man with the mussed-up hair of someone who has just dragged himself out of bed--which may be the case for this late-night jazz club habitue--has been the Los Angeles area’s premier jazz disc jockey since the mid-1950s.

The only thing in Long Beach that speaks with more deep-toned authority, jazz fans say, is the Queen Mary’s hourly foghorn.

Since his California debut on KNOB 38 years ago, Niles has also become Southern California’s No. 1 drumbeater for the propagation of the music in Long Beach and elsewhere, jazz musicians and radio colleagues say. The constant theme of Niles’ radio broadcasts is that bringing jazz performers and audiences together keeps the music going.

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For the last four years, Niles’ show has come from KLON, a listener-supported public radio station that is licensed to Cal State Long Beach.

“When I first heard him back in the KNOB days, he always said, ‘Get out and hear some live jazz, man,’ ” says Ken Borgers, Niles’ KLON colleague, who has been doing jazz shows for 25 years. “He’s always stirred the fires for the clubs.”

It’s still a frequent refrain when Niles is in the little broadcasting booth on the Long Beach campus from 3 to 8 p.m. weekdays.

His enthusiasm for the jazz scene is irrepressible. “I get so excited on Fridays,” he said a few weeks ago, before launching into one of his patented accounts of who’s playing where and when. “I mean, going into the weekend with all this live jazz around. . . .”

Off the air, Niles is self-effacing about his importance to jazz in the region. “I don’t regard myself as some sort of a pedagogue,” says Niles, a former professional sax and clarinet player. “But I used to be on the other side of the business. I had a good taste of being a musician, which might have given me a little more empathy.”

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In fact, it’s often the view from the bandstand--or from the dressing room behind the bandstand--that you get from Niles the broadcaster. In his patter, a musician doesn’t play a tenor saxophone, he sits “in the tenor chair.” A pianist, a drummer and a bass player are “a rhythm section.” A group of performing musicians, even if they’re only a trio, are “a band.”

A musician who has “chops” is an especially skilled one.

Niles has “chops” as a broadcaster, most musicians say. On the air, he’s lighthearted, witty and transcendentally knowledgeable about the music he plays, often throwing in inside information about a composition or a musician.

“I was at Donte’s when they recorded that,” he told his audience one recent afternoon, conjuring up a scene at a now-defunct North Hollywood jazz club where singer Carmen McRae had given a taut rendition of a ballad.

Niles hunches forward in front of the big broadcasting microphone, one hand holding his earphones in place like an old-fashioned telegraph operator, and ad-libs a few lines for each of the 30 to 40 tracks he plays each day.

“He’s No. 1--the best anywhere in the world,” says Stein, the former radio personality who was the co-owner of KNOB in its all-jazz years (the nickname came from his radio days during World War II, when he replaced a Chicago announcer named Wide-Awake Widoe).

On the so-called “jazz knob,” Stein, Niles and others placed Long Beach and Signal Hill on the jazz map between 1956 and 1968, playing the music of such West Coast innovators as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, as well as the be-bop standards from New York.

In the early 1960s, Stein hosted a radio show three nights a week from the Strollers, a Pine Avenue club, with live performances by drummer Chico Hamilton, playing rich, soupy jazz melodies with a quintet that included a cello.

The Strollers is long gone. But with a college campus that brims with musicians and jazz aficionados, a bustling downtown entertainment district and widely acknowledged preeminence in the broadcasting field, Long Beach still swings with the music, cool and hot.

“The Spruce Goose flew out and jazz flew in,” jokes jazz bassist Jim DeJulia.

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System M and Mums on Pine Avenue percolate most nights of the week with swing and be-bop, and the Blue Cafe, a block away on the Promenade, plays an eclectic brew of jazz, blues and rock. Meanwhile, up on Long Beach Boulevard, Phil Trani’s is astir with the blues, especially since gravel-voiced singer George Griffin set up house there a year ago.

The bad news is that Long Beach’s premier jazz club, Birdland West, where Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Les McCann and others once held sway, closed in July after sputtering eight years. The club finally succumbed to the troubled economy, said club owner Al Williams, who is seeking a jazz-loving buyer.

But Cohiba, a club upstairs from Mums, has just begun booking top-name jazz acts to play Wednesday evenings. Next week, for example, popular jazz singer Ernie Andrews appears at the club.

“It’s an eight-week test,” says DeJulia, who is booking the acts and who will play bass behind Andrews. If big audiences show up, the jazz will be extended to other evenings, he says.

But Niles and Borgers need look no farther than the campus around the radio station to see jazz taking root.

Cal State Long Beach has a widely praised commercial music program, a subdivision of the school’s music department, specifically designed to turn out professional musicians.

Under the direction of John Prince, a band leader and arranger, the program has been turning out top jazz artists for 20 years. Among them: bassist John Patitucci, pianist Cecilia Coleman and saxophonist/arranger Tom Kubis, all well-known in Southern California jazz clubs.

And the school is setting up an Institute for the Preservation of Jazz on campus, after getting approval from Gov. Pete Wilson last spring. A bill authorizing the institute had been vetoed twice by Wilson because he opposed spending state funds for the project. In its current form, the institute will be privately funded except for possible state arts grants.

The idea came from Assemblyman Willard H. Murray Jr. (D-Paramount), who has been concerned that jazz appeared to be a fading presence on the American cultural scene.

“It seemed that I wasn’t hearing jazz as much on the radio,” says Murray, an avid jazz fan. “At live performances, most of the people are older people. You don’t see too many young people there.”

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Among other things, the institute will serve as a museum. Historically significant music scores and oral history archives and similar materials will be digitalized, stored in computers and distributed to other educational institutions via telephone lines, Prince said. The institute will also offer a master’s program in jazz studies.

The school is embarking on a fund-raising effort for the program, said Barbara Bauer, development director for the College of the Arts. The first priority is to create an endowment fund of at least $1 million for graduate faculty, she said.

Despite the concerns of Murray and others about the state of the art, Niles thinks jazz is on the upswing among younger listeners. “I’m not saying jazz will overtake rock,” Niles says. “But I’m very bullish about it.”

In Niles’ youth, long before the Beatles or Motley Crue, jazz was the popular music. “Not the outrageous be-bop but subtle jazz--Nat (King) Cole, George Shearing, Billy May,” Niles says.

He started playing the clarinet at 7 in his hometown of Springfield, Mass., and by 14, he was playing professional jobs on the saxophone. His first job--or “gig”--was in a “house of ill repute,” according to Niles.

“It was during the war, when (musicians) were starting to disappear,” he says. “My folks were pretty liberal. This fellow, a piano player, asked them if I could work with him and my parents said, ‘Just make sure he’s OK.’ ”

Niles did a stint in the Navy toward the end of the war, saw some limited service on a destroyer in the Pacific--”and then Harry (President Truman) dropped the bomb.” The sudden end of the war in the Pacific after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, meant that Niles got released early.

Back in Springfield, he became a psychology and sociology major at American International College by day and a musician by night. “I met some guys who were musicians around town, and we said, ‘Let’s get a band together,’ ” he says. “We got some stocks--stock arrangements--and went to work. That’s how we learned. Sometimes it was embarrassing. I was never much of a (music) reader.”

It was soon apparent that, besides the clarinet and saxophone, Niles had another instrument with which he was even more skilled: his voice.

“I never did any exercise or anything, it just came,” Niles says.

From his college days on, it got him jobs. In Massachusetts he played records for a morning show called “The Coffee Club,” where the main fare was polkas.

He moved to jobs in Florida. “I was doing everything in Palm Beach,” Niles says. “I did the sports five nights a week on Channel 12 there, I was playing records on WEAT and, on Saturday, I had a dance party show, like Dick Clark with the kids. I could have run for mayor.”

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But Niles was restless and he had the acting bug. So he headed for California, and got into the movies. He has appeared in, among others, “Terror Circus” and “Hand of Death.” In “Teen-Age Zombies,” he played one of the title characters. “We had lifts in our shoes, pea jackets with a lot of stuffing and we walked around and grunted a lot,” he says.

He even got a part in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” though most of his lines ended up on the cutting room floor, he says. “I played a (guard) at Sing Sing,” Niles says. “The only line that was left in the movie was, ‘It’s time to go.’ ”

Around that time, he met Stein, who hired him for KNOB. “I’d drive down to Signal Hill every day from Pasadena, before they built the freeway,” Niles says.

Stein was impressed with Niles from the beginning. “He’s got knowledge of jazz, he’s a hell of an ad-libber and he’s got the voice,” Stein said.

Niles has been a fixture in the Los Angeles area ever since, not only as a radio personality but as a master of ceremonies at many jazz events.

“If I’m an emcee, I’ll bring something written,” Borgers says, “but Chuck just wings it completely. And it always works. He always says exactly the right thing.”

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Musicians gravitate to Niles, push their latest recordings at him and write music about him. He has been the inspiration for, among others, drummer Louis Bellson’s “Niles Blues” and composer Bob Florence’s “Be-Bop Charlie.”

“I tease him sometimes and call him the Symphony Sid of L.A.,” says jazz keyboard player and composer Horace Silver, referring to a famous disc jockey from New York. “He always plays the pure, authentic jazz, not a lot of watered-down semi-rock-’n’-roll jazz.”

Kubis, who now heads the Tom Kubis Big Band, says young jazz musicians dream about having Niles introduce their records on the air the way basketball players imagine Chick Hearn describing their jump shots.

“Musicians want Chuck to be the first guy to pay attention to their records,” Kubis says.

When Niles isn’t talking into the microphone, he’s a restless presence in the broadcast booth, handling half a dozen tasks at once. He pushes a CD into a slot in front of him, lines up more on a table and then races into the wire room for the latest traffic report.

Updating his listeners about traffic conditions every 15 minutes is one of the burdensome chores that falls upon the host of a drive-time show. “It’s hard to segue from some soulful experience into: ‘And five cars have crashed on the blah blah blah,’ ” Niles says wryly.

Then he’s rushing into KLON’s library of about 30,000 records and CDs, looking for that Dexter Gordon record he’s been thinking about or the latest from Joshua Redman. “This is how I get my exercise,” he says, moving briskly down the hall.

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As with all of the disc jockeys on KLON, Niles picks all the music for his show. “There’s no pie chart dictating what you play and when, as there is at almost every other station,” Borgers says.

Niles’ show usually includes a few vocal ballads and a Latin jazz number, with Niles delightedly rolling his Rs in the introduction. “Here’s Hilton R-r-ruiz playing the piano with El R-r-rey, Tito Puente.”

But mostly Niles plays “straight-ahead” jazz, a lot of up-tempo be-bop numbers with hard-driving saxophonists and trumpeters flinging notes out like hailstones.

There’s no real science to picking out the good stuff, Niles insists. “Just because you can play the flyspecks off the paper (the sheet music) doesn’t make you a good jazz player,” he says. “You gotta have what’s loosely called ‘soul.’ ”