What I am about to tell you is original-source material. I was there. I produced The Jazz Image with Leigh Kamman on Minnesota Public Radio for years. What I know about this show, about this man, and about what he built in the Twin Cities, I know from inside the room.
That is not a claim most people writing about jazz radio can make. It is worth stating clearly at the start.
Leigh Kamman was born in 1922 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He started broadcasting in 1939, when he was seventeen years old. He broadcast live from the Palm Cafe in Harlem in the 1950s, carrying the signal back to New York’s WOV radio from a room where the music was being made by the people who made it. He interviewed Charlie Parker. He interviewed Duke Ellington. He interviewed Dizzy Gillespie. He interviewed Billie Holiday. These are not the names of people he researched from a distance — they are people he was in the room with, people who spoke into his microphone, people whose voices went out over the air to listeners who were, in most cases, never going to have the opportunity to be in the room themselves.
That is what radio was for, in the era when Kamman built his career. A microphone, a transmitter, and someone on the other end who understood that what they were doing was connecting people to music they could not otherwise reach.
He came back to Minnesota. He spent the second half of his career here, at Minnesota Public Radio, hosting The Jazz Image every Saturday night from 1973 to 2007. Thirty-four years on the air. When he retired on September 29, 2007, he had been broadcasting jazz for sixty-eight years. He had been on the air longer than most jazz musicians had been alive. That is not a figure of speech.
What The Jazz Image Was
The Jazz Image was a Saturday night program on Minnesota Public Radio — two hours, sometimes more, of jazz presented by a broadcaster who knew the music from the inside and treated the listeners as people capable of meeting the music at its own level.
It was not a format show. Kamman did not play the same rotation every week. He played what he thought the music warranted — deep cuts from the Blue Note catalog alongside new recordings, historical recordings alongside live performances he had attended personally, albums he thought deserved attention alongside artists whose careers he had followed for decades. The through-line was his ear and his knowledge, which were both exceptional.
I produced that show. I sat in the control room while Leigh sat at the microphone. I watched him work — the way he prepared, the way he listened to what he was about to play before he played it, the way he talked about the music not as a curator presenting artifacts but as someone who had been present when much of it was made.
The production relationship — the producer and the host — is one of the stranger collaborations in radio. The host is the voice. The producer shapes what goes to air, manages the technical elements, ensures the program holds together across its running time. What I brought to The Jazz Image was attention and organization. What Kamman brought was everything else: the knowledge, the relationships, the sixty-plus years of having done this before I arrived.
What He Knew That Nobody Else Knew
Kamman had things that cannot be reconstructed. He had memories.
He remembered what Charlie Parker sounded like in conversation — not the recordings, but the actual voice of the man, talking to a microphone in the 1940s. He remembered what Billie Holiday was like as an interview subject, what she chose to say and what she declined to say, what was present in the room when she spoke. He had been in those rooms. He carried those rooms with him to every broadcast.
This is the irreplaceable quality of oral history at its best: the person who was there, who has preserved what happened through decades of returning to it in his work, who can tell you not just what the record sounds like but what the recording session felt like, what the club smelled like, what the musician said before the tape started rolling.
Most of that knowledge stayed in Leigh Kamman. Some of it made it onto the air. Some of it is preserved in the fifty-four boxes of scripts, correspondence, and photographs that are now archived at the Hennepin County Library. His papers. The record of sixty-eight years of jazz broadcasting, in a form that researchers can consult and that will outlast anyone who heard him on the air.
The foreword to Jay Goetting’s Joined at the Hip — the history of the Twin Cities traditional jazz scene — was written by Leigh Kamman. It is one of the last pieces of extended prose he produced about the music he had spent his life broadcasting. It is in print, in a book, accessible to anyone who wants to find it. What it contains is the perspective of someone who was present for the full arc of the scene it describes.
What Kamman and KBEM Built Together
The Jazz Image on Minnesota Public Radio and KBEM Jazz 88 at 88.5 FM were not competing operations. They were different layers of the same infrastructure.
KBEM was daily — the station you turned on in your car, the background music in your kitchen that turned into foreground music when something extraordinary came through the speakers. The Jazz Image was weekly — the appointment, the program you made time for, the broadcast that asked more of you because Kamman offered more in return.
Together they created an audience in the Twin Cities that was not just large but educated. People who listened to both broadcasts over years developed a vocabulary for the music — could hear the difference between a Prestige recording and a Blue Note recording, could identify the rhythm sections from different eras, could follow an argument about Miles Davis’s late period not because they had read about it but because they had heard it, over and over, explained by someone who had been present for most of it.
That audience sustained the clubs. It sustained the Artist’s Quarter and the Dakota and the Twin Cities Jazz Festival. It sustained the Jazz Society and Jazz Notes. The Twin Cities jazz scene is not what it is because of a single institution — it is what it is because multiple institutions built an audience over decades, and Leigh Kamman built more of that audience than anyone else.
After 2007
Kamman retired in September 2007. He died on October 17, 2014, at age ninety-two.
His papers went to the Hennepin County Library. The Jazz Image’s archive — recordings, scripts, correspondence with the musicians he had interviewed over sixty-eight years — is preserved there, available to researchers, a record of what one broadcaster did with a microphone and a Saturday night for three and a half decades in Minnesota.
I produced that show. I know what it cost him to do it well and what it gave to everyone who listened. The Twin Cities was fortunate to have him for as long as it did, and the archive is fortunate to have what he left behind.
Leigh Kamman’s papers are archived at the Hennepin County Library in Minneapolis. Jay Goetting’s Joined at the Hip, with a foreword by Kamman, documents the Twin Cities traditional jazz scene. The Jazz Image aired on Minnesota Public Radio from 1973 to 2007.
