Koz and Effect: Deejay Gig Extends His Reach as a Musician

It’s 6 o’clock in the morning, and do you know where Dave Koz is?

You might expect him to be where most jazz musicians are in the sunrise hours, in bed and blissfully enjoying an early-morning snooze. But if you turn your radio dial to KTWV-FM (94.7) “The Wave,” there he is, live and in person, spinning CDs and amiably leading the Southland listening audience through the drive-time hours.

So what’s going on here? Has Koz, whose smooth-jazz alto saxophone stylings have produced a string of chart-topping hit singles and gold albums, abandoned his shiny horns for a microphone? Has a radio studio replaced the performance stage as his primary center of activity?

The short answers--to quickly alleviate the worries of all Koz addicts--are, respectively, that he’s expanding his career opportunities, that he still has all his saxophones and that there will be plenty of opportunities to see and hear him in performance, including a summer and a Christmas tour before the year is out.

In fact, Koz, 38, has been a radio personality for some time. “The Dave Koz Radio Show”--a two-hour weekly program devoted to the pleasures of smooth jazz--has been in syndication since 1994, heard on more than 90 stations in the United States and 20 more internationally. But the KTWV gig, in which he is partnered with radio personality Pat Prescott, is a very different creature, one that startled Koz when it suddenly appeared on the horizon.

Earlier this week at the Capitol Records studios, adding to his already busy schedule with the production of an album associated with his annual Smooth Jazz Christmas tour, the dark-haired, compact Koz--who has the looks and the self-possessed manner of a successful actor--marveled at the new addition to his activities.

“I was originally approached,” he said, “by some of the Wave executives during a lunch at the Ivy--very Hollywood. They said, ‘We want you to be our morning show host. We’re interested in making a change and we think you can do it.’

“I was like, ‘Do you know that I have a touring schedule? How can I do it?’ And they said, ‘We’ll make it work for you. When you’re in town, you’ll be there. When you’re out of town, we won’t try to pull the wool over people’s eyes. After all, they can look at your Web site and know you’re in Detroit. So you’ll call it in from your hotel room, or you’ll go to one of our affiliate stations and do the show from there. It’ll be real, and it’ll be live.’ ”

Once past his initial surprise at the offer, Koz began considering the possibilities. It’s been a little more than 10 years since he burst onto the smooth-jazz scene with his hit album, “Dave Koz.” And, despite his syndicated weekly show, music performance, composing and production have always been at the heart of his interests and his activities.

He saw the KTWV position as an extension, rather than a deviation from those pursuits, a way to enhance rather than narrow his musical impact. That made the opportunity more appealing.

“It all began to make sense to me,” he explained, “when I looked at it from the point of view that the mission of the show is the music. I’ve always been a big proponent of talking about the artists. Since smooth jazz has so much instrumental music, it can be, in a lot of ways, sort of faceless. People like the music but they don’t really know anything about the musicians who make it.

“When I saw that we could be informative, in that sense, at the same time that we do all the regular early morning stuff, it all came together. Have fun, offer some uplifting morning messages, help people get up and moving in a positive way--that’s great, because it’s the kind of energy I feel most comfortable with in my own life.”

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Koz has a wide circle of friends and professional associates throughout the smooth-jazz arena.

“I try to add little anecdotes from time to time that help make connections with the musicians. For example, yesterday [trumpeter] Rick Braun was in here to work on our Christmas album, and he told me that his wife and he are expecting another child. So this morning on the show, I talked about Rick and his growing family.”

Koz’s new radio career represents a kind of full circle. Born in the San Fernando Valley, he started playing the saxophone in junior high school. But when he went to UCLA in the early ‘80s, it was to work on--and eventually to receive--a degree in mass communications. Despite the steady stream of gigs that followed his graduation, often with such prime talent as Bobby Caldwell and Jeff Lorber, it wasn’t until his first album was released that Koz fully sensed the potential for a music career and set aside his ambitions in the communications field.

Over the next decade, he played in sold-out venues before rapt crowds, occasionally opening for Kenny Loggins, Michael Bolton and others. He also added his highly personal sound to albums by Celine Dion, U2, Phil Perry, Stevie Nicks, Vanessa Williams and others. His own recording career continued at full tilt. He performed at President Clinton’s first inauguration and wrote (with his guitar-playing brother Jeff) the first new theme music in 30 years for the ABC daytime drama “General Hospital.”

“It’s been quite a trip,” said Koz. “But there were many times in the past when my career dictated things that it shouldn’t have, where it was so out in front of everything else that I wound up as a pretty unhappy person. After my album ‘Lucky Man’--which was very successful, with a gold record--I was so burned out that I moved up to Sausalito for four years.”

With the exception of his road tours, it was the only time he has lived away from Los Angeles. But it was, he feels, a necessary step in rediscovering himself.

“I think I just grew up,” he continued. “I realized that if I sold another thousand records it wasn’t going to make me a happier person.”

When the KTWV opportunity opened up, Koz saw it as a way to travel farther down the road of personal enlightenment.

“I feel like I’ve been on this bus,” he said, “making stops along the way--and sometimes strange stops, at that. But when the Wave stop happened and this opportunity came my way, I looked at it from a sort of--for lack of a better word--spiritual perspective that things just sort of happen when they’re supposed to happen.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in my life hitting my head against the wall, trying to find something else, trying to do this, trying to do that, and coming up short. And the things that come naturally, that you don’t have to look for, that just come to you as if they’re gifts--those are the ones that I’m finally paying attention to.”

There are those, of course, who would cast a somewhat jaundiced eye at the “gift” of having to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning to do a daily radio show. But Koz simply smiled and insisted upon the broader perspective. “Hey, look at it this way,” he said. “I didn’t really know the early-morning Dave Koz. As a musician, he was someone I didn’t have much of a chance to meet, and now I’m learning something about him.

“But what’s even more important are things like, maybe I can do something with this job, maybe this is something that’s really important for me to do, as a person, as well as for my own personal life. There have been been times when I’ve been on the road for three-quarters of the year, and I don’t want to do that anymore. Doing more focused touring, spending more time in Los Angeles, which is where I want to be--that’s what this job gives me the opportunity to do.”

“For that,” Koz concluded, “I’ll be happy to get up at 4 a.m.”

* “The Dave Koz Show” can be heard weekday mornings from 5:30 to 9 on KTWV-FM (94.7).