When a Jazz Master Was a KCBS Staff Announcer

Say “jazz” and “Bay Area radio” in the same sentence, and chances are, you’re talking about KCSM or the late, lamented KJAZ. Both stations cemented their reputations around jazz music.

But before KCBS became an all-news mainstay, the San Francisco station laid its own claim to jazz history. In the mid-1950’s, the station carried live weekly broadcasts from Club Hangover, an intimate and influential jazz venue on Bush Street, just off the Powell Street cable car line.

Fred Goerner, a longtime KCBS announcer who would later attract worldwide attention searching for the remains of Amelia Earhart, anchored those remotes from Club Hangover. Fortunately for posterity, Goerner hung onto dozens of recordings of these broadcasts, later giving them to colleague Ken Ackerman (BARHOF 2006). These tapes formed a fraction of Ackerman’s personal collection of broadcast recordings, teletype copy from important news events, and much more. The jazz recordings wound up at Stanford University, preserved in the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound.

One of the stars of those Club Hangover shows was a very big name in jazz: pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines. Not just a musical genius and gifted bandleader, Hines was a multitalented entertainer.  KCBS management soon realized he had the chops to host his own radio show, and starting in February 1956, that’s exactly what he did.

Early returns were positive. Contra Costa Times radio-TV columnist Bill Vavrick called Hines’ show “…the finest thing to hit Bay Area radio in a long-long time…a show that I rate very high on the list of must listening!”

The San Francisco Examiner‘s Dwight Newton was similarly impressed, calling it “the first local show in ages with a deejay who can entertain at his own piano, speak with the authority of a rich showbiz experience, and conduct fascinating interviews with triple threat dexterity.”

An undated KCBS promotional item–apparently from the late 1950’s– lists Hines among the station’s “staff announcers”. The term “staff announcer” may have been employed somewhat euphemistically; it was typically reserved for individuals providing full-time services under the terms of a contract between a station and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), as the broadcast performers’ union was known at the time.

At least seven future Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame members can be spotted on that roster, most of whom would continue with KCBS as it transitioned to the all-news format in 1968.

But only one of them is in the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame, an honor accorded to Earl “Fatha” Hines in 1965. His regular KCBS show had ended five years earlier, though he’d continue to be heard on the station in the early Sixties, swinging from a different venue: the Black Sheep Club on Geary Street.

Hines died of a heart attack in 1983 at age 79. The man Count Basie once called “the greatest piano player in the world” is buried in Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery.  Many of the recordings of his live performances have been assembled onto CD sets that remain popular among jazz aficionados, but his work as a KCBS program host seems to have been lost to history.