I have been asked this question many times, usually by people from other cities who are trying to understand why the Twin Cities have what they have. Why does a mid-sized Midwestern metro — not New York, not Chicago, not New Orleans, not Los Angeles — sustain a twenty-four-hour jazz radio station, a world-class club, a free festival that draws 20,000 people, a nonprofit performance space that runs nearly every night, and a continuous tradition of serious jazz that has been operating for over fifty years?
The honest answer requires acknowledging what should not work. Minneapolis should not have a jazz scene this deep. The population of the metro area is roughly 3.7 million — comparable to cities like Denver, Portland, and Baltimore, none of which have built anything resembling what the Twin Cities have. The winters are brutal and long, which limits outdoor programming and makes the months of October through April a test of audience commitment. The city is not on any musician’s natural touring route between the coasts — it is a destination you fly into rather than a stop you make while driving from Chicago to New York.
And yet.
I spent forty years inside this scene. I started in radio at fourteen because I could not get into the clubs legally and the musicians came to the microphone instead. I produced The Jazz Image with Leigh Kamman on Minnesota Public Radio. I served on the board of the Twin Cities Jazz Society and edited Jazz Notes. I watched KBEM Jazz 88 survive funding crises and format pressure. I heard Captain Jack McDuff play the Artist’s Quarter and understood why he had chosen Minneapolis for the last chapter of his career. I watched The Bad Plus come up through these rooms and become one of the most discussed jazz groups of their era. I watched Irv Williams play saxophone into his late nineties in the same city where he had been playing since the 1940s.
I have been thinking about this question for forty years. Here is what I have concluded.
It Was Not the Music
The music was excellent. The Peterson family produced musicians who appeared on over a hundred gold and platinum records. Maria Schneider grew up in a small town in southwestern Minnesota and became one of the most important jazz composers alive. The Wolverines Big Band has been playing for over fifty years. Debbie Duncan has been the voice of Twin Cities jazz for four decades.
But every city has musicians. Detroit has musicians. Cleveland has musicians. Kansas City had one of the greatest jazz scenes in American history and has struggled for decades to sustain it. The music, by itself, does not explain the infrastructure.
It Was the Infrastructure
The answer is infrastructure — and the specific people who built it and kept building it when the economics said they should stop.
KBEM Jazz 88 committed to twenty-four-hour jazz in 1985. That decision was made by people who believed in the music, in the teeth of every commercial radio logic that said jazz was a losing format. They were right, and they have been right every year since. A radio station that broadcasts jazz every day for forty years creates an audience in a way that nothing else can — daily, cumulative, reaching people in their cars and kitchens and offices who might not have chosen to be in the room but who gradually become people who would choose to be in the room.
Leigh Kamman spent sixty-eight years behind a microphone talking about jazz to anyone in Minnesota who would listen. He was doing it before I was born. He was doing it when most of the musicians he discussed had not yet been born. The Jazz Image ran for thirty-four years on Minnesota Public Radio, building the specific kind of listener who knows how to listen — who has a vocabulary for the music, who can tell the difference, who comes to the club ready to pay attention. You cannot build that listener in a season. It took Kamman decades.
Kenny Horst ran the Artist’s Quarter for thirty-seven years on no salary. He said, plainly, “I cut my salary to where there’s nothing left.” That is what it looks like when someone decides that a room is worth sustaining regardless of what the economics say. The AQ produced musicians who went on to national recognition — The Bad Plus, the Atlantis Quartet, Happy Apple — because it was the room where they could develop without the pressure of performing commercial success. You cannot manufacture that kind of room. You can only sustain it by absorbing the losses.
Lowell Pickett built the Dakota and kept it running for forty years. It is the last major jazz club standing in Minneapolis, which makes it sound like a consolation prize but is actually a remarkable achievement in a world that has been closing jazz clubs since the 1970s.
The Twin Cities Jazz Society produced Jazz Notes, organized the community, and eventually built the Twin Cities Jazz Festival — a free, multi-day festival in Mead Park that draws 20,000 people every June. The Society is the connective tissue. Without it, KBEM and the clubs and the musicians are individual points. With it, they are a scene.
The Multiplier Effect
Each of these institutions reinforced the others. KBEM built the audience. Jazz Notes told the audience where to go. Kamman deepened the audience’s relationship to the music. The Jazz Society organized the community around the institutions. The clubs provided the rooms where the music happened. The festival showed the city what the scene had built.
The multiplier effect is what separates a jazz scene from a collection of jazz venues. Any city can have a club. Fewer have a club and a radio station and a publication and an organization and a festival all operating simultaneously, each making the others more viable. When you have all of them at once, the scene becomes self-sustaining — the audience that KBEM builds fills the clubs, the clubs sustain the musicians, the musicians attract the touring acts, the touring acts justify the festival, the festival grows the audience that KBEM built.
Minneapolis had all of them. For decades. Simultaneously.
What Made People Build It
I keep coming back to the human question. The institutions explain the outcome. They do not explain why the institutions were built in the first place, or why they were sustained when every rational economic argument said to stop.
The answer I have arrived at, over forty years, is that the Twin Cities attracted and retained people who were stubbornly committed to building something that most people would have said was unnecessary. Kamman did not have to spend sixty-eight years broadcasting jazz in Minnesota. He could have built a different career. Horst did not have to take a zero salary to run the AQ for thirty-seven years. Pickett did not have to keep the Dakota open through every bad year. The people who started Jazz Notes did not have to produce a weekly publication about jazz in a city that most jazz publications ignored.
They did it because they decided it was worth doing and because they were in a community of people who had made the same decision. That community was partially self-selecting — people who felt that strongly about the music tended to end up in the same rooms, and the rooms reinforced the commitment. But it was also partially a function of what the city is: a place where people have historically been willing to build institutions for their own sake, independent of whether those institutions generate obvious economic returns.
What It Took
The Emporium of Jazz ran for twenty-five years in a town of 206 people because Dave Odell was a dentist who believed in the music. Jack McDuff moved to Minneapolis and stayed for eleven years because the scene was serious enough to sustain a musician of his stature. Maria Schneider grew up in Windom, Minnesota and became one of the most decorated jazz composers alive, carrying something of this landscape into her work. Irv Williams played saxophone in this city for seventy years because this city kept giving him rooms to play in.
Every city has musicians. Not every city has the people who build the rooms and the radio stations and the publications and the organizations that connect musicians to audiences across decades. The Twin Cities had those people. They built something that the size of the city and the severity of the winters and the distance from the coasts did not predict.
I was one of those people, in a small way, at a particular moment. What I did was less than what Kamman did and less than what Horst did and less than what the people who are still running KBEM and the Jazz Society and the Dakota are doing right now. But I was there, and I know what it looked like from inside, and I can tell you: it did not happen by accident.
It happened because people decided it was worth the effort. That is the only answer I have, and I believe it is the true one.
The Twin Cities jazz scene continues. KBEM Jazz 88 broadcasts at 88.5 FM. The Dakota is at 1010 Nicollet Mall. Jazz Central Studios is at 407 Central Avenue Southeast. The Twin Cities Jazz Festival runs every June in Mead Park. The infrastructure is still there. The music is still happening.
