Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we give our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.)
I gave up on my pickup truck one frosty weekday morning two winters ago.
I was rolling out of my apartment’s parking space when I heard a loud pop under me. I’d driven over a nail. I managed to attach the spare tire, but the wheels lost traction on the ice and the battery died in my final attempt to re-park the truck.
I was done putting more money into the old, two-wheel-drive vehicle. My next move was simple after all the frustration: I went online and donated my deceased truck to KUVO, the Denver nonprofit radio station that for 40 years has devoted itself to playing an endless stream of tunes from across the jazz spectrum.
The variety of music that this station — 89.3 FM on the dial — spins day in and day out is more than enough to keep me moving through the doldrums of daily life. Driving in rush hour, running errands, cooking dinner, entertaining guests, all of these activities become far more tolerable when listening to uninterrupted music that tugs at your inner urges to let loose.
Community radio and jazz has consistently found its way into my life. In high school, I started playing upright bass with friends in jazz bands, restaurant gigs and at our local academy in Tucson, Ariz. I was enticed by Tony Williams’ erratic drumming on Miles Davis’ “Miles in the Sky” and weeping ballads like Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and Duke Ellington’s “All Too Soon.” Jazz was a chance for me to witness collective groove, artistic intent, sentimentality and pure play. It gave me a freer perspective on life.
A job at Colorado Public Radio brought me to Denver four years ago. And when my wife flipped to KUVO on the radio a couple of years ago, it became our station of choice.
The station originally started in 1982 as a volunteer-run Spanish radio station assembled by investor Marc Hand and Hugo Morales, co-founder of the Radio Bilingüe nonprofit radio network, according to the KUVO website. The call letters when pronounced as one word sound like a slurred que hubo?, Spanish for “what’s happening?”
Station staff pivoted to jazz programming three years and several rounds of fundraising later in response to a public survey on show preferences, according to the website. KUVO is now part of the nonprofit organization Rocky Mountain Public Media. It hosts regular fund drives, including one that just wrapped this winter.
My jazz listening broadened in college and in my 20s, often toward more genre-clashing artists such as Toronto jazz group BADBADNOTGOOD, American guitarist Jeff Parker and fusion group Return to Forever, led by the late Chick Corea. Regular listening on KUVO proved how small my knowledge of the repertoire really was.
Throw the station on at any time and you’re likely to hear a different definition or presentation of jazz: Blues, salsa, soul, trad-jazz, vocal jazz, Tejano music. Maybe it’ll be a Louis Armstrong tune or a performance by a local high-school jazz band recorded live in the KUVO studios.
Credit is due to the station’s on-air hosts. Most shows on KUVO center around a single thread of jazz music, the DJs spinning household names but just as often dipping into lesser-known artists. They know the city’s jazz history, too, especially in the Five Points neighborhood.
Host personalities also crack me up: the dry jokes on “The Morning Set” (weekdays 7 to 10 a.m.); the fantastical-yet-trustworthy voice of Arturo Gomez on Lunchtime! (weekdays at noon); the times that Kim Berry makes herself chuckle on “Midday Jazz” (weekdays at 1 p.m.).
Berry is one of my favorite station DJs, comfortably flipping through decades of jazz history. She’s fond of greats like Sarah Vaughan and John Coltrane. The Sunday evening lineup is also stellar, starting with DJ La Molly’s globe-trotting “Super Sonido” at 4 p.m. and into “Brazilian Fantasy” with DJ Cenir at 6 p.m., a Brazilian music show on the air since 1993.
Keeping the lights on and the transmission running is no easy feat for public radio stations. They’re run primarily by volunteers, people who want to learn how to run a control board and play their favorite records. But the competition from playlist-ready streaming platforms like Spotify, commercial radio and other nonprofit stations is fierce.
KUVO more than deserved the $1,500 that my dented 2003 Ford Ranger ended up being worth. I don’t know of many cities broadcasting jazz seven days a week. In a world of endless choices, it makes my life easier.