RADIO : Around the Dial : Montana Plugs Into Los Angeles : The KSSE program director took an unusual route to Southern California and Spanish radio.

“I love this!” Haz Montana says with the same kind of enthusiasm Robert Duvall had for napalm in “Apocalypse Now.”

“I love this format. I love this music. I love being in a radio station that is presented in Spanish. I really do. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m a freak.”

Well, that’s a possibility. Let’s just say it’s rare for the son of Iraqi immigrants, raised in a Jewish neighborhood, to go on to program a Spanish-language radio station in the nation’s most competitive market. But that’s exactly what Montana’s been doing since landing at KSSE-FM (97.5) in Los Angeles 13 months ago.

A youth-oriented pop music station that debuted 2 1/2 years ago, KSSE--which bills itself as La Superestrella or the Superstar--has been remarkably consistent under Montana and assistant programmer Nestor Rocha, capturing 1.8% or 1.9% of the audience in four consecutive Arbitron ratings periods.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, five Spanish-language stations have done better, led by the overall leader KSCA-FM (101.9), whose audience is more than three times larger than KSSE’s. But then KSSE’s potential is limited by its signal. Although the station broadcasts out of a suite of offices in the middle of Koreatown, its 72,000-watt signal is based in Riverside. As a result, it can be heard clearly in Baker and parts of San Diego County, but not in the San Fernando Valley, which makes up a huge part of Arbitron’s sample audience for the Los Angeles-Orange County market.

“I knew fully what the station’s strengths were from a signal standpoint in accepting this job and coming into this position,” says Montana, 34. “And I knew that one of the things that is kind of a counterweight to it is that Los Angeles is a wonderful radio market. Here, more than anywhere, 10ths of a share can mean the difference in millions of dollars.”

Not that it was easy getting here, mind you. In fact, Montana relied on more aliases than a small-time con man and stopped in more Midwestern cities than a vaudeville road show during his 14-year journey to L.A.

Let’s start with the name. It’s a work of fiction. A combination of Haz, the diminutive of his given name, and a surname fished out of the sports pages when quarterback Joe Montana was at his prime, it was considered more catchy than Hazam Alwattar, which is the name on his birth certificate.

As for the resume, it reads more like a Greyhound bus schedule than a career path, with stops at places such as Grand Rapids, Mich., Quad Cities, Ill., Denver, Cincinnati and Miami. But it was the last two cities that proved the most important.

In Cincinnati, Montana worked for two years at Critical Mass Media, a radio research firm, an experience he likens to graduate work. “I learned tons there,” he says. “All PDs [program directors] work with research from one level to another, but I learned . . . not just the science of it, but merging it into the art of programming, the emotional element of it all.”

In Miami, he put that knowledge to use programming WRMA-FM, a Spanish-language adult-contemporary music station. Never mind that Montana spoke no Spanish. After all, it’s radio, not brain surgery. In English or in Spanish, if you spin the right records and give out the right call letters every 15 minutes, everything will be fine, right?

“The three things that people listen to radio for is entertainment, entertainment, entertainment,” Montana says. “And there are some clear things that transfer, conceptually, from the general market to Spanish-language radio. People like to hear their favorite songs. People don’t want to hear a lot of useless talk. People want their morning show to be funny.

“Those are general things that are all part of being a PD.”

Being a successful program director for a Spanish-language station, however, requires a little bit more work. “There are some clear cultural difference that you have to learn and know and be aware of and respectful of,” Montana says.

So he immersed himself in Spanish, taking classes after work and on the weekends.

“I had the great fortune of being in Miami, which is a place where Spanish really is the first language,” he says. “So no matter where I went, I was always being communicated to in Spanish. So you either pick it up and learn it and embrace it, or you get out of the way.”

Once Montana reached a conversational level of fluency, his language skills--combined with his experience as a Top 40 deejay and programmer and his background in research--made him a marketable commodity. And his decision to take those skills to Los Angeles couldn’t have come at a better time.

“In the last year . . . there has been an awakening on the general-market side to the reality and the power of the Hispanic population in Los Angeles as it comes to the media and every other walk of life,” he says. “It’s meant tougher competition for us [but] it’s a good thing for the market in that competition will always create better radio.”

And KSSE seems uniquely positioned to take advantage of the Latinization of pop culture. Not only was the station featuring artists such as Ricky Martin, Shakira and Enrique Igelias long before the English-language world discovered them, but the average age of the Latino population in the U.S. is 26--smack dab in the middle of KSSE’s target demographic.

As Montana sees it, the future looks bright for KSSE and its Spanish-language Top 40 format--a format, he notes, unlike any other in the country.

“I think the format is mass appeal,” he says. “It’s mainstream and has tremendous potential in other markets. The direction of our sound is going to be more a reflection of what the marketplace is producing and what the hits are. We can morph from pop rock to rock to pop dance based on what’s happening in the marketplace.

“I love walking into a club, hearing them mix in a song that only we play and hearing the entire place erupt in screams. I love that.”

Celebrating Their Own: “Latino USA,” the weekly national public radio show by, for and about Latinos in the U.S., will mark Hispanic Heritage Month with a special four-part series scheduled to air locally on KPCC-FM (89.3) and KPFK-FM (90.7) beginning Sept. 18.

The first segment, “Common Ground: Latinos, Filipinos and Native Americans,” will focus on the unique relationships among the three ethnic groups. The second installment, “Latino Parenting,” will look at a Los Angeles program that teaches parenting skills to young fathers.

In October, “Latino USA” will explore how Latino youth incorporate aspects of other cultures into their own in “Cross-Cultural Youth,” while the final segment, “Living Legends of Latino Music,” will profile Puerto Rican salsero Tito Puente, tejano queen Lydia Mendoza and Mongo Santamaria, the maestro of Afro-Cuban jazz.

“Latino USA” airs on KPCC Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. and on KPFK Mondays at 3 p.m. Hispanic Heritage Month begins Wednesday.

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“I love walking into a club, hearing them mix in a song that only we play and hearing the entire place erupt in screams. I love that.”

HAZ MONTANA

Program director at KSSE-FM