SAN ANTONIO – If jazz isn’t your jam, I hear you.
I wouldn’t say its mine either, though working on this story is changing that.
In fact, we believe the stories we found as the KSAT Explains team went down a rabbit hole of local jazz research transcend whatever genre might be among your most played tracks.
That said, when you think of music that “fits” San Antonio, you might think Tejano, country or even the love of metal in the Alamo City.
Perhaps not jazz.
1 of 2 in Texas, 1 of 58 in the U.S.
San Antonio has one radio station dedicated to jazz: KRTU 91.7 FM, housed at Trinity University.
“There is a love for jazz in San Antonio,” said KRTU General Manager J.J. Lopez.
The station has been around since 1976, but has been dedicated to jazz since 2002.
“It came to a crossroads... where do we go? Do we become a classical station? Do we commit to free form or do we become a jazz station,” Lopez said.
Listeners wanted jazz, he recalled.
“Community support for a noncommercial radio station is everything,” Lopez said.
“You don’t get jazz programing on the FM dial. You know, that’s the other thing, is we fit a particular sort of vacancy on the airwaves,” Lopez added.
Jim Cullum & The Landing
KRTU plays the music of many jazz greats, including those who are homegrown, like Jim Cullum, Jr.
He put San Antonio jazz on the map and vaulted the Alamo City into the national spotlight with his nationally-broadcast show, Riverwalk Jazz, which after Cullum’s death in 2019, is now streamed, collected and curated through Stanford University.
In 1963, Jim Cullum Jr. and his father, Jim Cullum Sr., opened the first nightclub along the Riverwalk called The Landing, where the Jim Cullum Jazz Band performed nightly.
That’s where Cullum Jr.’s son, Chris Cullum, fell in love with life in a restaurant.
“He was Mr. San Antonio,” Chris Cullum said of his father. “He was a giant in everybody’s world, not just mine.”
Chris Cullum, owner of Cullum’s Attaboy and Cullum’s Attagirl off the St. Mary’s Strip, plays his father’s music in his restaurant today.
He started washing dishes at The Landing at the age of 11 and said those were “some of the best years of my life” working and watching his father play and command a room.
“He would work with the energy of the room and the set and the music would go along with the service. So on a busy, you know, Saturday night, it would start very nice and soft and we would ramp up into the hot jazz and the tickets would be flying out the machine,” Cullum recalls. “The band would be going nuts. Everyone’s clapping and drinking and partying.
“Then it crescendos and diminuendos into the night and then he starts playing Hoagy Carmichael and blues and rhythm and blues and it just becomes this beautiful thing that I just miss so much,” Cullum said.
PUT FULL CHRIS CULLUM INTERVIEW CLIP HERE WITH CAPTION: WATCH FULL INTERVIEW WITH RESTAURANT OWNER CHRIS CULLUM REMEMBERING HIS JAZZ LEGEND FATHER
“I got the opportunity to work with Jim many times and he was an amazing person and so innovative,” Lopez said. “Not only did he start a jazz club, but he started a jazz club that was broadcasting on the radio. And this is already beginning in the 1960s.”
Jim Cullum Jr. named his son’s restaurant long before it existed.
Chris Cullum said as a teenager working at The Landing, he noticed there was an equalizer among any hungry crowd, whether they came in dressed up for a night of drinks and dining or whether they ate on the patio in shorts and T-shirt after visiting the Alamo. A hamburger.
Cullum told his father he wanted to open a burger restaurant and he shared the idea with his father.
Cullum Jr. told his son to come up with a list of names for his future eatery and the two would meet during the break of his Saturday night jazz show to discuss.
So the younger Cullum got his list ready.
“I meet him, it’s Saturday night. It’s during the break. I’m like, ‘Alright, Dad, I’ve got it. You know, let’s sit down. I’ve got my list. Here it is,’” Chris Cullum said. “He’s like, ‘Take your list and throw it away. It’s called Attaboy.’ And its been Attaboy ever since.”
“He was tough cookie, but he was also making you better,” Cullum said. “He wasn’t easy to work for, but he also wasn’t hard to work for if you’re working.”
A recipe for a thriving jazz scene
The musicians Cullum brought to his stage helped the genre grow in San Antonio.
“He was bringing musicians to San Antonio and that really started to foster, I think, that first big wave of jazz in San Antonio,” Lopez said. “A lot of people remember The Landing.”
That kind of mentorship is a jazz signature. Its education passed down by successful artists to those who aspire to be.
And its still happening here in the Alamo city.
“I kind of feel it’s been my calling,” said Adrian Ruiz, Ph.D., professional trumpet player and Director of Jazz Studies at St. Mary’s University.
The university puts on its own jazz festival coinciding with Fiesta each year.
Handing down a passion and education of jazz helps ensure its future, Ruiz believes.
“It has to be this perpetual kind of apprenticeship situation that I feel needs to happen in order for them to carry the torch of teaching this music,” Ruiz said.
Paving a path for the future of jazz helps continue the one already carved out by the great artists that Ruiz and others we spoke with for this story point to in the past:
George Prado & Aaron Prado, a father-son duo who are still performing in SA. Polly Harrison, Kyle Keener and Doc Watkins
“San Antonio has a strong and important place in jazz history,” said Mayor Ron Nirenberg. “We were part of what was called the Chitlin Circuit, the Chitlin Trail, which connected major places on the jazz scene like Chicago and in New York and L.A. and New Orleans. We were on the trail.”
It meant that big names like Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and more would come through San Antonio to perform.
“I was the one-time general manager of KRTU 91.7, the best jazz radio station in the world,” Nirenberg said.
Ask any of the jazz fans and aficionados we talked to and they’ll tell you there’s a recipe for a thriving jazz scene.
The ingredient list:
- jazz performing artists
- educators who propel the genre forward
- a radio station that plays jazz
- venues that showcase jazz performances
San Antonio has all of that, including Jazz’SAlive, a free jazz festival put on by the San Antonio Parks Foundation for more than four decades.
The festival showcases a variety of jazz performances, from traditional to Latin jazz and more, performed by local, regional and national artists.
“Seventy percent of our time will be spent with local artists who are, of course, supporting Grammy Award winning regional and national artists. But you know, really highlighting what we have here locally,” said Eliana Mijangos with GEM Strategy, which helps promote Jazz’SAlive.
Mijangos has her own memories of attending the festival as a child with her father.
“It’s one of those just really fun kind of close-of-summer events,” Mijangos said. “We’d throw out a picnic blanket, and you know, just hang out, eat popsicles. And he would just vibe out. My sister and I would dance around the park and it’s just a great family memory.”
Jazz’SAlive aims to be a tradition of the past that allows a new generation to fall in love with jazz.
“It’s never going to go away. It’s a high art,” said Chris Cullum. “There are other genres that will overshadow it. But it’s been here all along. San Antonio has such a rich history that it’s there if you want to find it.”
