The demise of KJAZ was mourned by fans of jazz music, who saw the station as a unique Bay Area resource.
On August 1, 1994 the jazz was replaced by the Spanish-language format known as La Z, pumped out of a suburban Sacramento station owned by entrepreneur Amador Bustos. Two years earlier, Bustos had set out to build a network of owned and affiliate stations carrying the programming. described as a mix of contemporary dance music, Top 40 hits, and urban music.
KZSF became the biggest property in the portfolio of Bustos’ Z-Spanish Radio Network. Bustos already owned KZWC in Walnut Creek. While the loss of KJAZ hit the jazz community hard, the Amador Bustos success story was hard to ignore.
A Mexican immigrant who acknowledged speaking no English when he entered eight grade, Bustos would become class valedictorian at Sequoia High School in Redwood City before earning multiple degrees from UC Berkeley and the University of San Francisco. He was working toward a PhD at Cal when he met KNBR community affairs director Jane Morrison. She hired him as an assistant. He would go on write editorials at KCBS before switching to advertising sales.
Over the next ten years working at a variety of Bay Area radio and TV stations, Bustos came up with the idea of a super-regional Spanish language network. Beginning in 1992, Bustos and partner Homer Campos started to assemble a portfolio of radio stations. They would eventually control more than two dozen stations across Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Texas. The network was acquired by Entravision in 2000 for $475 million.
As for KZSF, La Z didn’t stay long. By late 1997, increased competition for Spanish-language listeners on FM and rising market values for radio stations in general led Z-Spanish to announce a deal to sell KZSF and KZWC to Radio One. At about the same time, Bustos bought San Jose’s KKSJ (an AM station once known as KEEN), determining to shift the KKSJ call letters and the La Z programming to the AM band.
As it turned out, Radio One never held the keys to KZSF. Jacor Communications would wind up buying the two Bay Area Z-Spanish FM stations in a deal that valued KZSF at $16.5 million, sweeping out the La Z programming and installing a simulcast of San Jose’s KSJO in what it called the “92-Rock Network”.
For a while, the Alameda call letters remained KZSF-FM (remember, there was now an KZSF on the AM band in San Jose), before Jacor switched the calls to KXJO in February 1999.
