KSDS 88.3 Blog

KSDS GM Ken Poston (at right) interviews (from left) Alan Broadbent, Joshua White, Gilbert Castellanos, and Bill Mays on stage at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in La Jolla before KSDS’s Bud Powell Centennial Concert on Friday evening, Sept. 27, 2024.

Dear Jazz88ers,

It’s been a 12-round, knock-down, drag out brawl of a Fall Membership Drive, but after ten grueling days and unspeakable amounts of pizza and Italian beef sandwiches and enchiladas… after our gastrointestinal systems have begged for clemency and prevailed upon us with reflux and the other unmentionable weapons at their disposal, we’ve laid down our swords and returned to programming as regularly scheduled. 

KSDS/Jazz 88.3's 2024 Fall Membership Drive has concluded! We welcomed many new and renewing members and the music will continue to thrive because of it. If you would like to donate towards the campaign you can do so by clicking here. If you want a Dizzy For President shirt and pin let us know the size. Here is the Top Ten Artist Poll we conducted for the drive.

Bud Powell playing Birdland in 1949. Photo by Herman Leonard.

To our KSDS members, the jazz curious, the jazz adjacent, the community-minded, and the philanthropically inclined:

Matt Silver here, host of “Breaking Jazz,” writing to let you know that our Fall Membership Drive begins this Friday, Sept. 20 and runs through Sunday, Sept. 29. 

This season’s drive is dedicated to celebrating the principal architects of bebop—Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie, or “Bud, Bird, and Diz” for short. 

It’s not uncommon to celebrate the holy trinity of bebop, but, in this case, we do so with extraordinary attention centered on Powell. After all, this is an extraordinary year, the 100th anniversary of his birth, his centennial year. 

On Friday evening, September 27, 2024, KSDS will celebrate the Bud Powell Centennial — Bud’s 100th birthday — in a manner befitting the only man who can rightly be called the principal architect of modern jazz piano conception. Though Powell himself won’t be playing — he’s been dead 58 years, which is just another way of saying he was already booked — we’ve arranged the next best thing, an evening of unforgettable musical testimony to Powell’s enduring artistic influence starring three modern masters of the piano: Joshua White, Alan Broadbent, and Bill Mays. 

Buy Tickets

Portrait of Charlie Parker, Red Rodney, Dizzy Gillespie, Margie Hyams, and Chuck Wayne, New York City, c. 1947. Photo by William Gottlieb, courtesy of Library of Congress.

By Matt Silver 

There’s a famous quote attributed to Miles Davis. It goes, “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.” Whether that statement is fair or not — whether it does justice to anyone not named Armstrong or Parker — is beside the point. By most credible accounts, Davis, setting all the musical genius aside, was a brilliant provocateur, a hot-take pioneer whose aloof, disagreeable, superior demeanor was carefully and consciously constructed. Whatever Miles Davis played was what he genuinely believed; everything else was in service of a different department of the corporation.

Nevertheless, Davis's declaration — glib, reductive, and disingenuous though it may have been — resonates.

By Loren Schoenberg

In the rarified precincts of the jazz pantheon, Lester Young is unique in that the true essence of his genius remains obscure. Armstrong, Monk, Tatum, Coltrane and the others recorded prolifically in the studio and out of it, etching a relatively complete picture of their abilities. To be sure, there were extraordinary moments that vanished the moment they were created, lingering only in the memories of those lucky enough to have witnessed them. But with Young, the overwhelming consensus of those who heard him when he was young is that he could and frequently did play extended solos, and that it was only in that form that he could express his unique and large-range sense of musical architecture. So we are left to parse, ever so minutely, the shards of that vision as they are to be found on the recordings that comprise this collection. All jazz soloists up through the advent of long-playing records in the '50s had to learn to express themselves succinctly and no one did it any better than Young at his best. 

We've got TWO MONUMENTAL birthdays to recognize this week: Lester Young's (Aug. 27) and Charlie Parker's (Aug. 29). When we think influencers here at KSDS, we don't think college coeds hawking athleisure and makeup tutorials; we think Bird and Prez. Two sons of Kansas City, the Paris of the Plains.

New Orleans may be the birthplace of jazz, but Kansas City is the Cradle of Jazz. And it's not just Lester and Charlie. Along with Count Basie, they sport the most enduring legacies, but at Jazz 88.3 KSDS FM San Diego, names like Mary Lou Williams, Jay McShann, Ben Webster, Jimmy Rushing, and Jo Jones —  to name but a few giants of jazz who called KC home —  will never be neglected or forgotten.

Beginning Aug. 16, 2024, Ruffins will be broadcasting each and every Friday evening at 5 p.m. PST from Kermit’s Mother in Law Law Lounge in the heart of the Treme.

By Matt Silver

When the time came to find a new host for “Jazz Across America: New Orleans” (Fridays, 5 to 7 p.m. PST), Ken Poston, general manager of San Diego’s KSDS Jazz 88.3 FM, wanted not just to get someone good; he wanted to get someone perfect. Someone who wears the soul, the traditions, and the aspirations of New Orleans, jazz’s foundational city, on his richly designed, elegantly tailored sleeves.  

Balboa Theatre presents the Premiere of RACHMANINOFF AND THE TSAR.  Hershey Felder brings Rachmaninoff’s incredible story to life through his music - including his famous C# minor Prelude, second piano concerto, Paganini Variations and more.

Bring your friends and family!! Award winning blues musician Nathan James has built an international fan base with his masterful guitar playing and soulful vocals. He’ll be backed by The Rhythm Scratchers, his tight-knit trio. Featuring Stephen Hodges on drums, (Tom Waits, Mavis Staples, T-Bone Burnett), and Troy Sandow on bass and harmonica.