KSDS 88.3 Blog

KSDS/Jazz 88.3's 2026 Winter 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. Here is the Top Ten Artist Poll we conducted for the drive.

Here's the Top Ten:

1. Sonny Rollins
2. Oscar Peterson
3. Wes Montgomery
4. Kenny Washington
5. Johnny Hartman
6. B.B. King
7. Gerry Mulligan
8. Buddy Rich
9. Paul Desmond
10. Chick Corea

On March 21st it’s a tribute to the original ladies of jazz in “Flying High: Big Band Canaries who soared” at California Center for the Arts Escondido. Jazz canaries – Ella, Billie, Dinah, and even Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day – started off in the great big bands and went on to their own even greater solo careers. Now Champian Fulton shares the stage with Count Basie vocalist Carmen Bradford and the Hot Sardines Elizabeth Bougerol to swing the memorable tunes of the jazz canaries. Tickets and information are found here.

Davis famously informed his musicians they’d be playing the gig for free just minutes before downbeat. What followed was one of the most celebrated live jazz performances of all time.

Black History Month 2025 continues with week 2 of “Freedom Now! Jazz and the Fight for Civil Rights.” 

• Long before the 1619 Project, there was Ellington’s Black, Brown, and Beige, a sprawling jazz symphony meant to communicate a comprehensive picture of African American history through music. 

• Long before Wynton Marsalis became the first jazz musician to win a Pulitzer, Norman Granz treated jazz as high art, imploring audiences to listen with the same reverence they might reserve for Bach or Brahms.

Tune in every weekday this Black History Month from noon to 1 p.m. Pacific.

*Note: All programs to air from noon to 1 p.m. Pacific. If you’re unable to catch a program live, each day’s program will be made available for on-demand listening the next day here. 

Week 1

February 3

Black and Blue: Louis Armstrong and Civil Rights

Hosted by Will Friedwald with special guest Ricky Riccardi

February 4

Breaking Barriers: Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton

Hosted by Loren Schoenberg

February 5

Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit: Protest in Song

Hosted by Will Friedwald

KSDS apologizes about our broadcast signal and stream being down. We are currently working on the issue and hope to have it resolved as soon as possible. Thank you all for reaching out to let us know. It is always reassuring to hear from so many people. We are grateful for your understanding and patience. Tuesday, 12:32pm

To register for the inaugural semester of KSDS’s Jazz University, call 619-388-3000 or email Chuck@jazz88.org.

The inaugural semester of KSDS's Jazz University will kick off on Thurs. evening, Nov. 7 at 7 p.m., on the campus of San Diego City College. Classes will meet at the Black Box Theatre, on City College's campus, the first three Thurs. evenings in November (Nov. 7, 14, and 21), from 7 to 9 p.m. The culmination of the course — the “Final Exam” — will be a dinner party, with authentic New Orleans cuisine, hosted at Nola on 5th in Hillcrest on Thursday, Dec. 5, 2024 at 7 p.m.

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

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.