Building the KUVO Sound

I came on and in 1987 and the first thing I did was look at the playlist of 500-600 that rotated every day, and they were the same songs because that's all we had to work with everything. Everything was scripted out so the announcers would have to play what was on that list. My number one objective was to open up the music mix as much as possible. I needed people to start to do their own curation. That meant that you had to listen to this music and select the songs to put on the air. This really opened up the sound of the station.

We did that for the first seven or eight months that I was here, and then in December 1987, I decided that we should be really playing straight ahead, real Jazz. I explained this to Flo, and she gave me the green light. The KUVO format changed in January 1988 and starting then we played what was known as mainstream jazz, acoustic jazz, “straight ahead” jazz. All of a sudden you started hearing artists like Betty Carter and Herbie Hancock, and we still kept the world mix in there. That was important to our sound - Hugh Masekela, Dollar Brand. At the same time we elevated the presence of Latin Jazz. It had always been there, but I needed to hear some Latin Jazz in each and every hour. Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente, just to mention a couple of artists, became a big part of our sound.

Note that I'm not talking about salsa necessarily, which we played a little bit on the weekends. But we went for more died-in-the-wool Latin Jazz. We were very much New York-based because my Jazz background was New York and San Francisco where I had lived. I wasn't really keen on a lot of the Southern California Jazz that was a little more laid-back – Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan and stuff like that.

What I learned as a program director from getting out in the community and answering phones was that the West Coast scene was really important. As it turns out, Denver has always been a great place for West Coast Jazz to play because of the proximity to LA. So, I realized we need to play more of them and balance the laid-back West Coast sound with the more aggressive nature of the of Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon. We also brought forth the whole essence of where Jazz came from, so you started to hear the New Orleans jazz musicians Louis Armstrong and traditional jazz artists. We brought in Ella and we balanced that with the contemporary vocalists like Dianne Reeves, Diana Krall, and Cassandra Wilson.

It took a while for people in Denver to really come to grips with the Latino presence in jazz and it wasn't well received at first. We also had the mix of Brazilian and the Afro-Caribbean sounds.

KUVO was considered more swing-based and much more traditional Jazz. Our station has anchored itself around modern jazz, meaning Hard Bop – the Art Blakey, the Donald Byrd, Clifford Brown and Max Roach. The big band sound has always been popular in Colorado, so obviously we played Count Basie, Duke Ellington, the Mingus Big Band, and a little later on Thad Jones and Mel Lewis.

We also put an emphasis on the artist and the education aspect of why these artists were important, and how the music developed beyond Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. We would focus on the great piano players - Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal. We still play Brubeck. I encouraged the hosts to do the research, so when they played guitarists like Pat Martino, John McLaughlin, Wes Montgomery, Pat Metheny and George Benson, they would share what their contributions were to the music. The same with organists - Jimmy Smith, Larry Young, Charles Earland, Joey DeFrancesco and Papa John DeFrancesco.

The local music scene has really expanded since KUVO has been on the air. I really wanted to be sure we played the music of the artists who lived here without creating a separate local music show for an hour or two. I felt that the talent here was as good as anywhere. Ellyn Rucker and other great local musicians should be heard on the air just as frequently as anybody else. They didn’t have the national accolades but they should be in the mix, so you always heard artists like Eric Gunnison, Rich Chiaraluce, Ken Walker plus many others. It was really important that we establish credibility with our local music community.

The next big thing during these early days was developing specialty music programs that highlighted various forms of music. We knew we had rock-solid mornings on Sunday because of Cancion Mexicana. So for Sunday afternoon, I wanted to do more of a Caribbean or salsa type show, so that’s where the Latin Musicians show came in with Max Salazar, who did a similar show in New York for years. Then Rico Rogers and Ed Martinez started to produce the show locally, and then Jimmy Trujillo after that. Origins – Orgy in Rhythm with “Scotty” featured African musicians, also Reggae, and even a bit of Motown.