2024

John Clayton, co-founder of the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra and mentor to countless young jazz musicians, is one of the premier jazz bassists of the last half-century.

It’s been 60 years since Dizzy Gillespie’s candidacy injected music, levity, and a focus on civil rights into the 1964 presidential election. By now, you’ve read and heard quite a bit about the concert we’re presenting on Sunday evening, Oct. 27 to celebrate that anniversary. And by now, you know the legendary names leading the band: Faddis and McPherson.

Now it’s time to make like Art Pepper… and meet the rhythm section. 

The November 5, 1964 edition of Downbeat with a cover titled “Dizzy’s Dream Inauguration Day, 1965.” Gillespie, of course, was never actually inaugurated – he never even made it on the ballot – but his humor-filled campaign sparked important conversations about the urgency and efficacy of the Civil Rights Movement to that time.

By Matt Silver

By now, you’ve heard it several times: Sixty years ago, Dizzy Gillespie ran for president. And it was kind of a joke but also kind of serious and ultimately not ever fully viable. All that’s true enough, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story.

In 1964, Dizzy Gillespie mounted a half-serious run for president. When asked why, his response: “Because we need one!” So on Oct. 27, KSDS is celebrating the 60th anniversary with a star-studded concert headlined by Jon Faddis and Charles McPherson. Why? Because we need one!

Just minutes after the Bill Mays Trio closed last Friday night’s Bud Powell Centennial concert with a euphoric take on Powell’s “Parisian Thoroughfare” that left us all exiting the concert hall floating at least three feet off the ground, the KSDS brain trust convened an emergency session in the atrium of The Conrad. We resolved not to rest on our laurels. The music we presented that night was too special, too magical for us to wait several months before bringing you another evening of commensurate artistry. 

And so we did something that might seem counterintuitive; we turned to the upcoming presidential election for inspiration. 

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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. 

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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.