Photo: Rodney Franks (from KUVO’s website) | By Kyle Harris, Denverite | When Musa Bailey cooks dinner for his son Glenn, he turns on the jazz station KUVO. But the public radio station founded in 1985 just doesn’t sound the same anymore, Bailey and other longtime listeners lament.
For some, that’s because the music has veered toward what they call “smooth jazz.” For others, the departure of four favored hosts has left them mourning and wondering if the station will survive. Some believe the merger with Rocky Mountain PBS under the Rocky Mountain Public Media umbrella has corporatized what was once a mom-and-pop shop driven by a pure love of jazz and an authentic connection to the Five Points community.
The station itself is wrangling with many big changes.
In 2020, the station moved from the cozy but dusty Five Points Media Center on Welton Street to the state-of-the-art Buell Media Center closer to downtown. Then came staff transitions with a push to expand audiences that sometimes chafes hosts’ and listeners’ cultural and aesthetic priorities. KUVO’s been trying to grow its audience with new programming while pleasing longtime donors and volunteers who are allergic to the new audience-friendly direction.
The biggest shift: The impending retirement of veteran General Manager Carlos Lando, and the arrival of new Program Manager Max Ramirez, the third program manager in the station’s history. He’s a self-professed “radio nerd.” At a meeting where KUVO fans were blasting changes he’d enacted, he joked that he’s so young “I might as well be wearing diapers” and boasted that at the last radio station he worked at, a Kenny G photo was a Halloween decoration.
Ramirez said he understands that there is a lot of dissatisfaction, at a public meeting Tuesday night.
“I take that. I internalize it. I try not to take it personally. But I do personally care,” Ramirez said. “It does affect me. And I want to make sure that going down the road, we do communicate better. I accept that. And that’s on me. We should be more transparent, even more so than we are.”
For Bailey, KUVO is a Denver institution that dates back to his childhood, when his dad would pick him up from school and blast jazz standards all the way home.
In the decades since, Bailey became one of the city’s most prominent hip-hop DJs. He toured with Saul Williams and spun samples with members of the Wu-Tang Clan at Red Rocks. He opened and closed the club Cold Crush, and in recent years, he’s worked on a stop-motion animation with his son, meticulously moving action figures one frame at a time, as jazz played in the background.
As a DJ, he researched music to sample while listening to KUVO’s shows, a mix of jazz and blues standards, contemporary fare, Latin jazz and other music from around the world. The station was a place to discover great, yet unfamiliar tracks.
Bailey’s favorite KUVO host, Rodney Franks, hosted the 4 to 8 p.m. slot since 1995, spinning a mix of contemporary and classic jazz.
“Rodney is the voice of that station to me,” Bailey said. “He’s the person I look forward to hearing talk, his humor and his knowledge of the music. He’s spent his life studying that form.”
Earlier this year, Franks’ voice disappeared from the air. So did another favorite of Bailey’s: Susan Gatschet . . .
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Go here to read the lengthy and more descriptive article?
https://denverite.com/2022/09/22/kuvo-and-fans-debate-the-denver-jazz-stations-vision-after-hosts-were-fired-or-pushed-out/
[Thanks to Alex Teitz for contributing this article! http://www.femmusic.com]