Matt Silver

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. 

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. 

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.

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.  

By Matt Silver

If there’s one thing that all the great jazz masters agree on, it’s that mimicry is not jazz, at least not good jazz. Maybe it’s part of the developmental process, but it’s the antithesis of what you strive to present to an audience.

By Matt Silver

There are some things in life you don’t want to perceive being made—laws and sausages chief among them. On the other hand, there are the yoga studio idealists whose wisdom suggests the opposite, that the process is everything, that life’s beauty resides in the journey, and that once you realize that, the destination becomes almost beside the point.

The bandstand at Cinema Under the Stars on Feb. 29, 2024, just minutes before Luther Hughes and the Cannonball-Coltrane Project took the stage to cap-off our month-long celebration of the Coltrane Legacy back in February. These events, where we come together over food, drink, and music — as a community — don’t happen without your appetite for them. For so many reasons, we need them more now than ever; your dedicated and continued support makes it all possible. Photo by Chad Fox.

By Matt Silver

Hey there, Jazz88ers. It's been a whirwind of a last ten days, but we made it. The 2024 Spring Membership Drive has concluded. We welcomed new members — some had been listening for years and chose this week to take that next step; some, like one woman I remember speaking with who was in town visiting from North Carolina, were excited to find something new that they might now make part of their everyday lives. And we heard from many familiar names who've been riding with us for all or part of the last 50 years.

We can’t bring you back to the grand auditoriums that hosted installments of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, but we’ll come closer than anyone else.

By Matt Silver

This July 2nd will mark 80 years since Norman Granz presented the very first Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP). So named because it was held at Los Angeles's Philharmonic Auditorium, then the 2700-seat home of the LA Phil, JATP was the first, the biggest, the longest running, and the most socially impactful jazz concert series of its kind.