His Love of Jazz Runs Deep

The voice is immediately identifiable. Deep, resonant, intrinsically hip, intrinsically identified with jazz. And, by almost any definition, KLON’s Chuck Niles is the voice of jazz in Los Angeles, and has been the Southland voice of jazz for decades--the Minister of Cool.

Two years ago, Niles was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This year, he celebrates his 50th year as a broadcaster.

“I don’t know what to say,” he says with a shrug, his resonant basso profundo making anyone near him sound like a boy soprano. “It kind of snuck up on me. I guess I’ve just been lucky to be around all this time, doing what I want to do, with the music I love and never getting cornered into anything else.”

The tall, angular Niles, an immediately recognizable figure in local jazz clubs, has been a fixture at KLON jazz radio since 1990. Prior to that, he spent nearly three decades at KKGO, and before that served stints at KFOX and KNOB (called the Jazz Knob), and--in the early ‘50s--at stations in Connecticut and Florida.

“I guess I’ve been playing jazz forever,” Niles, 72, says during one of his jazz club stops. “But you know, the music of the day when I started out in 1950 was both pop and jazz. Billy May, George Shearing, Nat Cole--that was popular music, but it was jazz too.”

Radio was not high on his list of priorities in the late ‘40s, however, when he was a young college student in Springfield, Mass. Far more interested in making it as a musician, he gigged as a saxophonist-clarinetist with local bands, playing the dance circuit around New England. His radio debut can best be described as casual. It took place when a piano player he knew suggested Niles might do well as an announcer.

“I thought, ‘Why not?’ ” he says, “even though I wasn’t all that interested because I was too busy playing. But I started out doing sports, and then, after I graduated in 1951, I almost immediately went to work for WTXL in West Springfield.”

From that point on, radio took priority over Niles’ career as a musician. But he admits to still owning a couple of clarinets.

“Every once in a while I’ll take one out,” he notes with a chuckle, “and work my way through Charlie Parker’s ‘Yardbird Suite’ or some other bebop piece, just for my own amazement that I can still do it.”

When he arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-’50s, however, he--like so many other arrivals--harbored show-biz ambitions.

“I’d been working for about a year or so in Palm Beach, Fla.,” Niles recalls, “where I really had it made. I was doing radio, I was doing TV, and I had a Dick Clark-type dance show on Saturdays. But I was bored, and I’d always had a notion to try acting--my dad was an actor. So I figured I’d give L.A. a shot, even though I hardly knew a soul out here.”

A referral from a friend in Florida quickly led him to a job at KFOX. And, given some of his experiences in acting, it was probably just as well that he kept his radio day job.

A Flirtation With Acting

“I did all the cattle calls,” he says. “And I picked up a television gig at Channel 9. Steve Brody, the actor, did a half-hour from 7 to 7:30 and I did from 7:30 to 8 in a program that was packaged as an hour of adventure and danger [called “Strange Lands and Seven Seas”]. Basically, I interviewed people who would go take pictures of zebras and lions roaming the jungles of Africa. I’d say, ‘Well, how’d you do in Africa?’ Obviously I didn’t last long with it.”

Niles also earned a place in cult-film history with his role in the picture “Teenage Zombies.”

“I didn’t have any lines,” he says, “but I played a sort of Frankenstein character. They put lifts on my shoes, I had to have a beard, and they put bags under my eyes. The name of the character was Ivan, and the picture was without a doubt the worst movie ever made.”

Interestingly, Niles had much better luck with the theater, touring in summer stock, doing roles in plays such as “Death of a Salesman” (in the role of Biff), “Light Up the Sky,” “Dial M for Murder,” “Absence of a Cello” and, as he says, “numerous others.”

During all the time that he was trying films, television and theater,

however, he continued to maintain his radio work. “I had a family to support,” he says, “and I just didn’t want to give up my connection with jazz.”

But he once came close.

“I did a play at the old Ivar Theater in 1958, when I was at KNOB,” says Niles. “The leading lady--she could have played linebacker for the Chicago Bears--was the one with the money for the production, and it was basically a play about her. When I got the second lead in it, I called my boss, Sleepy Stein, and told him I’d gotten my big break, that I was going to go to New York and become a big star. Well, the play folded in about three weeks and I had to go back to Sleepy and say, ‘Hey, Sleepy, it’s me, Chuck. I really wasn’t serious when I said I was leaving.’ ”

Niles left KNOB in 1965 to begin a long run at KBCA, whose call letters were later changed to KKGO, the shift coming, according to Niles, because of a confusion with KABC. In yet another of the whimsical radio memories that Niles delivers with the verve of a practiced raconteur, he recalls the day the change was to be announced.

“Saul Levine,” says Niles, “who owned--and who owns--the station, came in one day and said, ‘I’ve decided to change the call letters. What do you think of KKGO? We can call it Kay-Go.’ I wanted to tell him you’d have to sound like Kate Smith singing ‘When the ma-moon comes over the ma-mountains’ to make that work. You’re not going to get Kay-Go out of KKGO. But, hey, he was the guy who signed the checks.”

And who continued to sign Niles’ checks until 1990, when Levine made a decision to convert KKGO’s programming from jazz to classical music. Niles was saddened to see the change but made an immediate move, with Levine’s assistance, to KLON.

“I had some ambivalence, after all those years,” he says. “But KLON was my cup of tea because they played my kind of stuff.”

His sonorous voice has been a mainstay of the station ever since, currently heard in the prime slot of 3 to 6 p.m. It has resonated through Southland radio waves during decades of rock, disco, alternative, rap, hip-hop and talk radio, and shows no signs of disappearing any time soon. For Niles, it’s been a great way to make a living, surrounded by the sounds he loves most.

“You know, the truth is,” he says, “that I’ve never known that much about radio, actually. Jazz has been my primary interest. I’ve never cared about what kind of microphone I talked into, and I don’t know megawatts from shmegawatts. All I’ve ever needed has been a few jazz albums, a microphone and my big fat mouth.”

* Chuck Niles can be heard weekdays from 3 to 6 p.m. on KLON-FM (88.1).