I started in radio at fourteen — well under the drinking age, and well out of reach of the clubs. Radio was the door that was open. The musicians came to the microphone, and I was there.
That accident of timing — entering the Twin Cities jazz scene through a radio station rather than a club — shaped the next four decades of my life. It also introduced me to the institution that, more than any single club or festival or organization, is responsible for the fact that the Twin Cities has a jazz scene at all.
KBEM Jazz 88 is a full-time jazz radio station broadcasting at 88.5 FM in Minneapolis. It is owned and operated by Minneapolis Public Schools. It has been on the air since 1970, broadcasting jazz twenty-four hours a day since 1985. It streams worldwide at jazz88.fm. According to the Twin Cities Jazz Society, it is the sixth-largest jazz radio station in the nation. Over 100,000 people listen every week.
There is no other station quite like it in the country. And most people outside Minnesota have never heard of it.
How a School District Ended Up Running a Jazz Radio Station
KBEM started as a teaching tool. Minneapolis Public Schools launched it in October 1970 as a student broadcasting program — students learning the craft by running a real station. The signal was small. The audience was limited. The content was whatever the students and faculty decided to put on the air.
The jazz format developed organically, took hold through the late 1970s, and became official policy in 1985. That year, KBEM committed to twenty-four-hour jazz programming — a decision that, at the time, went against every trend in commercial radio. Jazz was not a format that made advertising executives comfortable. It was not a format that demographic research recommended for a mid-sized Midwestern market. It was the format that the people running KBEM believed in.
Four decades later, they were right.
The station has survived multiple existential threats. In 2004, MnDOT proposed eliminating $418,000 in annual funding that supported the station’s operations — a cut that would have ended twenty-four-hour programming or the station itself. The jazz community mobilized. Letters were written. Testimony was given. The funding survived. KBEM survived.
It was not the first time someone had tried to rationalize the station away. It will not be the last. The people who run KBEM have spent decades proving that jazz radio in a mid-sized Midwestern city is not a luxury but a load-bearing wall in the structure of the local music community.
What KBEM Does That Nothing Else Can Do
A radio station does something that a club cannot do and a streaming service cannot replicate: it creates a shared experience in real time across an entire city.
When KBEM plays a set at six in the morning, every person in the metro who has their radio on that station hears the same music at the same moment. When the station broadcasts the Twin Cities Jazz Festival live every June, people who cannot make it to Mead Park in person can hear every set from wherever they are. When a DJ introduces a twenty-two-year-old Minneapolis pianist before the station plays her record, listeners learn a name they would not have encountered elsewhere.
This sounds simple. It is not. It is the work of decades.
I watched what radio did for the Twin Cities jazz scene from the inside. I worked at KBEM. I later produced The Jazz Image with Leigh Kamman on Minnesota Public Radio — a show that ran from 1973 to 2007, thirty-four years on the air, hosted by a broadcaster who had been interviewing jazz musicians since the 1940s. Kamman interviewed Charlie Parker. He broadcast live from Harlem in the 1950s. He came back to Minnesota and spent the second half of his career making sure this city heard the best jazz in the world, every Saturday night, for free.
The Jazz Image and KBEM were not competitors. They were different layers of the same infrastructure. KBEM was the daily signal — the station you turned on in your car, in your kitchen, in your office. The Jazz Image was the weekly deep dive. Together, they built an audience over decades that knew how to listen to jazz and wanted to keep listening.
When Kamman retired on September 29, 2007, he had been on the air longer than most jazz musicians had been alive. His papers — fifty-four boxes of scripts, correspondence, and photographs — are now archived at the Hennepin County Library. The Jazz Image lives in those boxes. So does a record of what this city chose to care about for thirty-four years.
The People Who Keep KBEM on the Air
A radio station is not a building or a frequency. It is the people who show up every day and decide what goes on the air.
Patty Peterson is still on the air at KBEM. She is the daughter of Willie Peterson and Jeanne Arland Peterson — pianist, vocalist, and songwriter — the musical family whose legacy runs through four generations of Twin Cities jazz. She has been broadcasting jazz in this city for decades, and in 2020 the Jazz Journalists Association named her a Jazz Hero — an annual recognition given to community advocates who make a significant contribution to their local jazz scene. Patty Peterson has been making that contribution since before most of the people receiving Jazz Hero awards were born.
Yonci Jameson became music director in 2025, joining a staff that includes Arne Fogel, Peter Solomon, Danny Sigelman, Manny Hill, Sam Keenan, Lady Luca, and Bobby Vandell. These are not part-time volunteers filling airtime. They are musicians, educators, and broadcasters who have built careers in the Twin Cities jazz community and bring that knowledge to every show they host.
In 2023, AMPERS — the Association of Minnesota Public Educational Radio Stations — named KBEM Station of the Year. The award recognized not just the quality of the programming but the station’s role in the community: its educational mission, its live festival coverage, its commitment to local artists, and its forty-year track record of keeping jazz on the air in a city that needs to hear it.
What Happens When Jazz Radio Goes Away
When a jazz radio station disappears, it does not just go quiet. It takes an audience with it.
Jazz radio stations have been disappearing across the country for decades. Commercial stations switch formats because the advertising math stops working. Public stations shift priorities when funding changes. The result is not just the loss of a broadcast signal — it is the loss of the daily reminder that jazz is present, that it is being made by people in this city, that it matters.
The Twin Cities has not lost that reminder. KBEM has been on the air every day for over fifty years. It has outlasted commercial jazz stations in larger cities. It has outlasted the format predictions that said jazz radio was finished. It has outlasted multiple funding crises and every argument that no one was listening.
People are listening. Over 100,000 of them every week, in a metro of 3.7 million. That is not a niche audience. That is a constituency.
I spent my career inside the Twin Cities jazz community partly because a radio station gave me a door in when the clubs were closed to me by law. What I found on the other side of that door was a city that had decided jazz was worth sustaining and had built the institutions to prove it. KBEM was the loudest piece of that decision. It still is.
If you want to understand why the Twin Cities has a jazz scene that mid-sized Midwestern cities are not supposed to have, turn on 88.5 FM. The answer has been broadcasting for fifty years.
KBEM Jazz 88 broadcasts at 88.5 FM in Minneapolis and streams worldwide at jazz88.fm. The station covers the Twin Cities Jazz Festival live every June from Mead Park.
