Radio legend bids farewell to the airwaves

By John Croman

Saturday nights will never be the same.

Leigh Kamman, the host of ?The Jazz Image? on Minnesota Public Radio, has decided it?s time to hang up the headphones and move away from the microphone for good.

The final installment of his show will air September 29 ending a remarkable 34-year run on MPR. And for Leigh, it?s the end of a radio career that stretches back more than 65 years.

?I?m tracking 85 and I?m rusting, r-u-s-t-i-n-g,? Kamman explained.

He plans to write a textbook about the history of jazz broadcasting. We can only hope he mentions a guy named Leigh Kamman.

His own life spent promoting jazz and the artists who create it, has been an amazing journey. It?s taken Leigh from the halls of Saint Paul Central High to some of the finest jazz clubs in the world, leaving him with no shortage of tales to tell.

Hawk, meet Oscar

Take, for instance, that pivotal moment in 1942 when Leigh introduced Minnesota bass man Oscar Pettiford to legendary tenor sax player Coleman Hawkins. That night Leigh was preparing for a live broadcast at The Flame supper club in Duluth, where Hawkins was playing on tour.

"Coleman looked over at him and looked at his bass," Leigh recalled.

"And said 'Play something for me.' Oscar played this beautiful Blanton theme."

Coleman was so impressed he invited Pettiford to join him on stage for the show which was being broadcast live on Duluth station WEBC where Leigh worked as an announcer. "He joined him that night on the broadcast and then we adjourned to the studio and jammed all night long," Leigh recounted with a gleam in his eye.

Pettiford would soon join the ranks of jazz elite. But that night the ranks of Uncle Sam's army were knocking on Leigh Kamman's door.

"We almost lost our jobs that night, but they knew we were leaving in December for the military and we were!"

The war years

He'd spend World War II producing and hosting broadcasts from Fitzsimmon's Army Hospital in Denver.

Many of the shows aired in house for the hospital's 2000 patients, while others were broadcast on Armed Services Radio and to the public on the powerful Denver station KOA.

"We had a program called Yank Sick Call, built around the patients who were not ambulatory. Instead of having a man-on-the-street interviews we had ward rounds."

The surgeon who conducted the interviews had received a Purple Heart himself for being wounded in combat which impressed the patients he'd interview in their hospital beds.

"But to open the program I had Karl Malden, who was also a patient at the hospital."

After the war Leigh would find himself back in the Twin Cities jazz scene again, with stints at WMIN and WLOL. It was a time marked by a battle between fans of traditional jazz and the new form of the genre known as Bebop.

"No matter what you music you put on the radio you weren't going to please everyone. We tried to give everybody something they'd enjoy."

Unforgettable night in St Paul

It was during that period, in 1946, Leigh witnessed something unforgettable. Duke Ellington had headlined a concert at the Minneapolis Auditorium with jazz guitar wizard Django Reinhardt.

After the concert Leigh drove Sir Duke across town to the Hotel Saint Paul, where a reporter was waiting on the top floor to interview Ellington.

"The lobby looked pretty much as it does today. As we approached the elevators we were directed by the bellhop to take the freight elevator," Leigh remembers.

"And that was a signal. We never got to that interview. We turned about."

One of the greatest American composers wasn't good enough that night in 1946 to ride the main elevator at the St Paul.

"It had been a long day for Duke Ellington and we drove him through the night to his hotel. He was so graceful about it. He had a way of handling things, arch skilled in public relations."

The local concerts and dances Leigh produced, at places such as the Calhoun Beach Hotel, were always open to all races.

"Every Sunday night we ran jazz concerts. For everyone the door was open. For 99 cents you could go to the Coke bar. They were family events."

Landing in Harlem with Patty

When Leigh's wife, singer and composer Patty McGovern, moved to New York to pursue her career Leigh followed her.

"She was the second lead singer of a group that came out of Saint Olaf, called the Honey Dreamers. They did all sorts of soundtracks and commercials."

The night we visited Leigh Kamman in the studios of MPR he played a cut from an album Patty recorded in the 1950's. He played it straight with his listeners, when the song "Love Isn't Everything" ended.

"That was Patty McGovern, with a Tom Talbert arrangement of Patty's message. Lyrics and music, and her song performance."

On the air he didn't delving into the fact that he was once married to Patty and that she's the mother of his two daughters. But he clearly still holds her talent in awe.

"Her skills and art, she's way up there. Not because we ever, just because of what she has to offer."

While the Honey Dreamers were appearing in clubs and on radio and television, Leigh was looking for a radio job in New York. He eventually landed a position at WOV radio in Harlem as a staff announcer.

That led him to work on the "1280 Club" which again gave him the opportunity to rub elbows with jazz greats and emerging talents at places such as the Palm Cafe.

Photos from the Harlem era depict Leigh sitting with the likes of bandleaders Gene Krupa and Stan Kenton, and posing with rising young starlet Diahann Caroll.

One of the interviews from his days at WOV, with Bebop virtuoso Charlie "Bird" Parker, took him by surprise. He asked Parker what records he'd recommend to the audience at home, and Parker responded with classical music selections.

"I would say the semi-classicals, Stravinsky's Firebird, Rite of Spring. History of a Soldier," the enigmatic Parker told the radio man Leigh Kamman.

"He had that side of him that hardly any of us really were privy to and that was a stunning telephone interview."

Painting with words

Loyal listeners know Leigh has a way of describing the settings and the moods behind the tunes he's spinning. Recently as his opening theme, "Django's Castle," faded out he pushed the microphone button and began to paint a picture.

"That was a Sunday afternoon, a long yesterday ago in New York City, Greenwich Village. Jerry Mulligan and his concert band."

Creating images is a skill he picked up early in his career, taking listeners along to places they may never get to see in person.

"I tried to take people back to situations like that. So many of us couldn't afford to go anywhere back then."

That scene setting talent came in very handy during his stint at KSTP radio in the 1950's Leigh hosted the Minneapolis leg of a rotating live jazz broadcasts on NBC radio.

"NBC Monitor originated jazz from around the country on Friday and Saturday nights. It moved from New York, to Chicago, next stop was Minneapolis St Paul."

In one clip from the NBC Monitor show you can hear Leigh telling America, "That's Teddy Wilson on the piano and this is Leigh Kamman from Freddy's, America's newest and smartest jazz club."

After he tossed it back to the announcers in New York they could be heard saying it made them wish they were in Minnesota.

"Yes, they said something to that effect."

Jazz beyond definition

Leigh Kamman would never attempt to define jazz, or even answer the question, "Jazz is?"

"I wouldn't attempt that in 30 words or less," Kamman told us.

He defers to what Duke Ellington once told him in an interview.

"He said it was freedom. That's it, horizontally and vertically."

Or, as Ellington put it to Leigh in that interview, "The symbolism of Jazz is America and the symbol of America is freedom. And without freedom of expression you can't have Jazz."

And despite all he's seen and done in more than six decades Leigh Kamman says he's still learning how to talk about jazz.

"It's a study to be able to express it, the words, and I not being a musician, how to make that bridge between music in the density of a composer's mind and the listener's ear."

Who is that woman singing?

We couldn't resist asking Leigh about the show's signature sound, his distinctive filler music with the haunting female voice scatting with a brass section.

On the air he often refers to it as "music from the land of the midnight sun." It's from a rare recording by Swedish singer Alice Babs with Duke Ellington and composing partner Billy Strayhorn.

The session, taped in Paris in 1963, was once available on the Telestar label out of Germany under the title "Serenade to Sweden" but it's long out of print. That's why the odds of hearing it any place other than "The Jazz Image" are pretty slim.

Some will miss it when Leigh signs off for the last time, while others clearly will not.

"There's a whole group out there, close friends even, they just badger me all the time about it. They'd rather see that air time go to new music they haven't heard."

But Leigh also has a personal connection to Alice Babs. Back in those days of doing the live jazz shows from Freddy's night club he had her on the show.

"We had on live the Swe-Danes, and one of the Swe-Danes was Alice Babs. I always had a fascination with her."

How it all started

Leigh may have devoted much of his life to keeping jazz on the radio but that's not where he first heard that brand of music. He caught the jazz bug while working a summer job at a lake resort near Glenwood, Minnesota in the 1930s.

The owners collected folk and jazz records and would spin the platters at night on their hand cranked turntable.

"We would hear this music floating through the air and it would be Bessie Smith, be Duke Ellington, Andy Kirk and Mary Lou Williams and the Clouds of Joy. That was the beginning of it."

While he was still a senior at Saint Paul Central in 1940 he landed his first gig at WMIN radio. He and a classmate approached the station's managers about doing a jazz show and hit a brick wall.

"They said summer will be coming up. Would you like to be a gopher, distribute mail, work with our chief engineer, do anything we need done? We grabbed that!"

Before long Leigh was lugging radio gear around in an old Crossley panel truck, recording local jazz bands. Eventually he got to host midnight broadcasts from Mitch's Roadhouse in Mendota.

"The house band there, the Mendota Buzzards, were really quite significant. Paul 'Doc' Evans on trumpet and coronet, and the pianist was the mayor of Mendota Red Dougherty."

Signing off

It was that part-time job that launched Leigh's career. And 67 years later he's finally decided it's time to take that long delayed vacation and get to work on that jazz radio textbook.

The final installment of "The Jazz Image" is slated to air on all MPR stations 9pm to midnight Saturday, September 29th. In the Twin Cities you can tune in on KNOW, or FM 91.1. The show will be repeated on The Current, 89.3 FM the following day from 8pm to 11pm.

The tools of the trade have changed greatly in the past 65 years. The advent of digital sound rendered much of the old radio gear obsolete.

And yet Leigh's true instruments, his voice and his mind, transcend technology. He'll be missed.

By John Croman, KARE 11 News

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