If you talk to jazz vocalist Fred Johnson, he’ll tell you that something changed in the Bay area jazz scene after WSJT 94.1-FM left the dial (the smooth jazz station briefly lived on a HD2 channel, but it’s since disappeared from there, too).
“Commercial radio really had advertisers and folks that were willing to support music. Clubs knew that, and there were more venues and opportunities for local artists to play and for national artists to come to town,” Johnson said.
“And so for me, a huge negative impact on the live jazz scene in Tampa Bay was the loss of commercial radio.”
To some extent, the same thing happened in print media.
More than a decade before the 2017 departure of renowned jazz critic Nate Chinen from The New York Times, journalists like Tampa Tribune critic Philip Booth and Eric Snider (who was a critic at the then St. Petersburg Times before coming to Creative Loafing Tampa where he worked for a dozen years) were exorcised out of the local media landscape. The absence of their bylines left the state of Bay area jazz criticism relatively dried up. In 2019 there are flickers of jazz in the local media landscape. CL tries to do its small part by focusing on jazz in its weekly live music previews and the occasional print feature, but radio is where jazz thrives in the Bay area.
Two WMNF 88.5-FM programs — the new “Colors of Jazz” and DJ Luis “Speedy” Gonzalez’s long-running Latin jazz and salsa program — are dichotomous highlights of the community radio station’s Sunday programming. WUSF 89.7-FM, however, rules the roost when it comes to jazz on the airwaves in Tampa Bay.
Saturday nights, from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m., are home to Christian McBride’s National Public Radio program Jazz Night in America, and each night of the week finds a rotation of five hosts and other contributors — WUSF Jazz Director Mike Cornette, Lorri Hafer, Jackson Harpe, Richard Jimenez, and Dominic Walker, along with Whitney James and Steve Splane — spending the “other nine to five” (that’s 9 p.m. to 5 a.m.) presenting the best new releases, local jazz artists, a “jazz trip at ten” segment, live sessions and tunes from a focus artist of the week.
Jimenez, Harpe and Walker each have master's degrees in either Jazz Performance or Jazz Improvisation, and a commitment to the genre oozes off of every voice on the WUSF team. In a 2017 interview with CL, Cornette said that listening to the 250 new jazz releases he gets every year takes some discipline.
“My car gets to act as a bit of a music lab at times. My office is just stacked with CDs,” he said. “I listen to a lot of music.”
Programing roughly 60 hours of music each week isn’t a heavy burden, according to Cornette, who caught back up with CL last week, but it is the station’s cross to bear.
“I think it’s a labor of love, really. We all love what we do here. It’s a lot of fun — there are worse jobs on the planet,” he said.
WUSF has also pretty much redoubled its efforts to get with the local jazz community and make sure that programming reflects what’s happening on the ground in Tampa Bay. McBride’s program is a chance for local listeners to hear what’s happening on the national scene. Sometimes — like in the case of Bay area trumpeter James Suggs, whose debut album, You’re Gonna Hear From Me hit the jazz charts in a big way — the national and local jazz worlds collide.
“It raises visibility for him and for the area,” Cornette said of Suggs’ chart wins. He added that drummer Dave Rudolph also saw an album, Resonance (which featured local players like LaRue Nickelson, Zach Bornheimer and Pablo Arencibia among others), hit the charts.
“Getting on that chart is good for those guys because they can turn around and say, ‘Hey, I was on the chart,’ and they might get a gig out of it.”
Unlike pop, rock and hip-hop, jazz publicists still send Cornette’s team a ton of CDs. The deluge of mail is a sign that, in some ways, jazz has been slow to adapt to the changing music industry. And while Cornette’s team is always moving forward (a new website, wusfjazz.org, will probably be the definitive hub for Bay area jazz), he doesn’t mind jazz’s slow adaptation.
“All the CDs are proof positive that the jazz is still alive. People are still making records — really good records,” Cornette said. “That’s been a lot of fun as well.”
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This article appears in Jul 18-25, 2019.