KSDS 88.3 Blog

KSDS/Jazz 88.3's 2025 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. Here is the Top Ten Artist Poll we conducted for the drive.

Here's the Top Ten:

1. Art Pepper
2. Wes Montgomery
3. Oscar Peterson
4. Freddie Hubbard
5. Sarah Vaughan
6. Ray Charles
7. Kenny Washington
8. Gilbert Castellanos
9. Lester Young
10. Art Tatum

For KSDS’s Matt Silver, Ron Shelton’s “Bull Durham” is a perfect game.

By Matt Silver

“Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls — it’s more democratic.”

By Matt Silver

"I see great things in baseball. It's our game — the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us." -Walt Whitman

* * *

One great thing about the American experiment in federalism and representative democracy is that the highest expression of its brilliance isn't obvious. It’s not the free market or the social safety nets meant to mitigate its savageries. It’s not working or paying taxes or running for that seat on the school board. It’s not governing or legislating or administering the laws of civil society as they’ve been enumerated. It’s not even when we vote, even if the cloyingly precious stickers — now hallmarks of polling place egress — suggest county election boards are united in thinking otherwise. It’s when we are at leisure, when we are exercising a right that the founding fathers, in a departure from virtually every set of expression of political philosophy to precede it, considered inalienable — the right to pursue happiness, to have some ownership of the most valuable commodity to mortal man: time. 

Our Fall 2025 Membership Drive begins this Friday, Sept. 26. Our theme is Jazz & Baseball. Twin pillars of classic American culture, both quintessential representations of democracy in action and the twin engines of individual creative expression and teamwork.

By Matt Silver

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how social this music can be. On Tuesday evening, Aug. 12, Eric Reed reminded us, with a Hampton Hawes-inspired performance that was charming in a way that feels much less common today than maybe it once was.

By Matt Silver

For legions of people of all worldviews, sensibilities, and persuasions, the world feels like a chaotic mess. Despite this – or, more likely, because of it – people seem hungrier than ever for meaning, connection, community. One of the ways this manifests is giving. Giving is virtuous. Whether its any of the world's major religious faiths or a more secular set of life-organizing beliefs or principles, most with any kind of historical staying power seem to keep this close to their core.

But man's generosity is not infinite, nor are his resources. And the demands for both feel greater and more persistent than ever.

Which begs some version of the question stated above in this post's title.

When you're an organization like ours and you take to the airwaves to ask people for money and you tell them it's urgent and existential, it's a question you have a responsibility to ask yourself. So, first, I asked myself, "Why should our radio station continue to exist as a community resource?" And I think I answered that one okay. But, then, the radio station is one thing; the broader effort to ensure the future of the artform we champion is another, warranting its own explanation. So, why jazz? I've found it nearly impossible to answer without being nauseatingly maudlin and high-minded. So, indulge me; this comes from an honest place, and it's the best I've come up with so far.

By Matt Silver

If we weren’t part of your life, there’d be no sense in asking. But we know that we are; we see you, we hear you, we know you. And you know us.

That’s rare these days, in the era of Amazon and digitally delivered entertainments. If we’re old fashioned, it’s not in the manner of mustachioed hipster bartenders who call themselves “mixologists.” Rather, it’s in the spirit of Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer and John Coltrane. We won’t be held hostage by the political fads and fixations of the moment. After 50-plus years, we, like Kern and Mercer, know that this year’s fancies are passing fancies.

How are we so confident? Because we have you.

Jazz 88ers,

KSDS is facing an emergency, and we need your help. You already know the broad strokes. Federal funding’s gone. More specifically, we will be without $200,000 we were relying on to operate. We still need it; it's just not coming. 

This "Now's the Time" campaign is not a membership drive. Membership drives are doctor’s visits you make even when you’re well, to stay well. This is more akin to emergency surgery… without insurance.

By Matt Silver

You ever have a stretch of days where everything — every task, every responsibility, every obligation whether big or small — just feels way harder, way more fraught with obstacles and landmines than it ought to?

Hi there, Matt Silver of KSDS coming to you from our innovation labs here on the campus of San Diego City College with good news and bad. Here’s the bad: despite our best efforts, time travel remains only theoretically possible at this time. Decreased government funding of public media has all but guaranteed that our time machine development project won’t be ready for the next pledge drive. 

The good news is that here at KSDS, we’re mighty resourceful.