This Black History Month, We're on a Mission
Here at KSDS Jazz 88.3, celebrating the central role Black artists have played in the creation, development, and continued evolution of the music we champion is a critical part of our mission all year round. But as a public broadcaster and one of the few remaining radio stations — public or commercial — devoted entirely to presenting jazz and the blues, we’re called to step up our game each February during Black History Month.
We’re proud to answer that call with unrivaled passion for the subject matter and a dedication to presenting jazz and the blues as a vital, humanizing resource that transcends the sum of its parts.
What does that mean exactly? Well, think about a filmmaker and historian like Ken Burns. What about jazz appeals to him as a storyteller? I think the appeal is that jazz itself is a great documentarian. The stages of jazz’s development — its idiomatic evolutions and revolutions — are reliable tools with which to mark time and chart modern American history.
Consider the role jazz played as the de-facto soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement. The Movement informed the music, and, in time, the music came to inform the Movement.
That’s why this Black History Month, we’re launching a comprehensive musical retrospective of the civil rights movement titled Freedom Now! Jazz and Civil Rights, where we’ll be revisiting the major (but, also, the too frequently overlooked) historic events at the intersection of jazz and the fight for civil rights. Each weekday at noon, our expert hosts will play the music that fortified and galvanized our nation’s signature campaigns for equality and dignity.
I don’t haphazardly throw around the word “expert.” Will Friedwald, Kenny Washington, Neil Tesser, Loren Schoenberg, Chuck Granata, Ricky Riccardi. The voices you’ll hear hosting this special programming all month long. These guys are the preeminent music historians of our time. This is not hyperbole.
The topics they’ll cover will include but certainly not be limited to:
- Louis Armstrong’s heart-rending 1929 critique of racial inequality, “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue.”
- Billie Holiday’s haunting and groundbreaking 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit,” which, though under-recognized as such, is probably the first great protest song of the Civil Rights Movement.
- Duke Ellington’s 1941 musical satire, “Jump for Joy,” which is one of the earliest and most trenchant send-ups of the entertainment industry’s patronizing and pervasive racism.
- The night in Jan. 1938, more than nine years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, when Benny Goodman, joined on stage by the likes of Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, Buck Clayton, Cootie Williams, Harry Carney, Freddie Green, Lester Young, and Johnny Hodges, broke racial and musical barriers by bringing an integrated band playing not classical music, but jazz, into Carnegie Hall.
- The music from impassioned musician activists like Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Nina Simone, and Archie Shepp (among others) that animated the height of the Civil Rights Movement from the mid-1950s onward.
Unlike other radio stations, and especially the streaming platforms, we bring you the all-important BIG C… CONTEXT! Each musical selection will be faithfully and accurately placed within the socio-political context of the time. In other words you’ll get a full serving of the “What” and “When” but you’ll also get the all-too-often neglected “Why” and “How.”
Our goal here at KSDS is to provide listeners with more. We’ve taken to calling it Enhanced Listening. It means more context, more insight, more archival audio; more rare and never-before-heard artist interviews. The music PLUS a whole lot more that upgrades the music from an abstraction to something more resonant emotionally and more digestible intellectually.
So tune in every weekday at noon PST, and visit our website for new, multimedia content offerings all February long.
And, remember: You might not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but having a finger on the pulse of the jazz scene — and the pivotal periods in American history during which it evolved — can only up your credibility as a reliable cultural barometer.
You know where to find us: KSDS Jazz 88.3 FM in San Diego and, all around the world, at jazz88.org and the KSDS mobile app!
In a world where you can be anything, Be Bop!
With gratitude,
Matt Silver and the KSDS Programming Team