It was the last Tuesday before winter break at Minneapolis North Community High School, and while Polar students roamed the halls and classrooms and her fellow KBEM Jazz88 crew filed into the school-based radio station’s studios for their weekly staff meeting/holiday potluck, Yonci Jameson found herself tucked into her tiny office desk and in tears.
“I’m so sorry, I can’t believe this,” said Jameson, dabbing at her wet eyes and cheeks and grabbing a tissue to clear her tear-fogged glasses. The floodgates opened in response to a question wondering if the 27-year-old jazz musician/scholar/radio veteran feels like she’s maintaining her family’s legacy as jazz lovers, a love that earlier this month led to Jameson being named music director at the 55-year-old station.
“Absolutely, it’s very emotional,” said Jameson, who hosts “The Afternoon Cruise” on KBEM weekdays 3 p.m.-7 p.m. “My grandmother passed in March of 2023, my grandfather in December of 2021, so it’s actually been four years, and it hit me the other day when I was here on the air, like, ‘Wow, I absolutely do feel like I’m living in their image.’ A walk-through of certain songs will get to me, and I’m like, ‘I can’t read what I’m saying [without getting choked up], I’ve got to be professional!’
“And so I think being in this space, being at the school, being on air, being able to play this music, absolutely, it feels like ancestral veneration — just living, being, feeling embodied in this is what you know what they’d want.”
The native Northsider’s roots run deep in jazz, education and community radio: She’s the longtime former host of KFAI’s “Mostly Jazz,” a program launched by Jameson’s late great-grandmother Patricia Walton in 1993 and hosted for years by her late grandfather, the acclaimed photographer, poet and artist Bill Cottman, whose late wife and Yonci’s grandmother was the beloved storyteller, teacher and artist Beverly Cottman.
“When they were alive, when I was a student in jazz, I did some announcing with the ‘Jazz at MPS’ class program here, so for all of us jazz education has always been on the radar,” said Jameson, a graduate of Minneapolis Southwest High School, Walker West Music Academy and Minneapolis Community College. “We’ve always had jazz on our select radio dials, and there was always a conversation of, ‘I wish they would play this more often, or that more often.’ So it’s kind of funny, because I’m like, ‘Well, now I’m here and I get to play all the songs that you wanted to hear. And I know that you’re listening still.’”
Lucky listeners who tune into “The Afternoon Cruise” find a fresh voice in Jameson’s, one that cuts through with knowledge, passion and humanity — the kind of warmth-behind-the-mic that dial-punchers are hard-pressed to find in these sloppy days of robotic DJs and artificial intelligence hosts.
“I’m reading this book right now, ‘Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist,’ by Liz Pelly,” said Jameson, whose mother, Kenna Cottman, is a celebrated choreographer and teacher.
“We exist in a culture of streaming and just instantly accessible music. And I think that now people are seeing music as just a soundtrack, but also a background soundtrack. There’s not a culture of deep listening anymore, and so that’s a lot what this book is talking about, specifically with Spotify.
“Spotify has a feature where you can have an AI deejay sort of do it, but what you want are radio hosts who you know and can recognize their voice and who can acknowledge you and say, ‘Hey, thanks for listening, playing this song for you, thought of you, here’s the story behind the song.’ With young people in this moment, I feel like there’s a shift happening in a return to analog media and whatnot, and [human DJs] is part of that. I’m very passionate about that.
“So one of my goals is to bring a different generation on by being myself as much as possible, and to let people know that you can still say all the newscasts and give all the context and the personnel of who’s on the track, and then also, just the relatability. How is this actually hitting for me, so that we can hit the same way? I strive to be authentic, and I strive not to be, I don’t know if ‘corporatized’ is the right word, but I don’t necessarily want to flatten my voice. People want to hear humans at the end of the day; you are tuning in because you want to feel connected in some way, so that’s what I aim to do and provide, is connection.”
A bass clarinetist, artist and dog-lover who identifies as she/they, Jameson and her partner and fellow artist/musician M. Jamison run Studio Arisaema, which offers programs and grants for marginalized artists.
“We call it Studio Arisaema because we’re both queer trans people, and arisaema is a plant that changes its sex during its life,” Jameson said. “So we titled our studio after this, because we are super passionate super advocates for queer trans people of color in the arts.”
A fierce supporter of public broadcasting in general, Jameson’s tenure at KBEM begins at a tumultuous time when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has lost funding under the Trump administration. As the station website reminds listeners, “Loss of federal funding has taken over $120,000 out of the KBEM budget. That’s the funding that has paid for ‘BBC World News,’ ‘Jazz Night in America,’ ‘American Routes,’ and ‘Jammin’ Jazz.’”
“We’re talking about a loss of publicly accessible archival knowledge and education, and I don’t think people know enough about what can be lost,” Jameson said. “I think there’s often a disconnect between jazz music and blues to the sounds of hip-hop, the sounds of rhythm and blues that we’re hearing now. I worked with KRSM 98.9 in South Minneapolis, running their youth internship programs, getting kids even younger than me to understand that jazz is the foundation for all of your favorite pop songs.
“Getting people to trace that is the educational piece that gets lost when we see stations go under because they don’t get this funding, so I feel really grateful for the Jazz88 community, who’s super invested in the station, but it’s more than just music. For me, it feels like it’s bigger than music. It’s a cultural thing. It’s an educational piece. It’s an access piece. We have this ecosystem here that can be a conduit for so much.”
KBEM Jazz88’s veteran DJ staff includes Patty Peterson, Arne Fogel, Peter Solomon, Danny Sigelman, Manny Hill, Sam Keenan, Lady Luca and Bobby Vandell. Like Jameson’s, these are familiar voices to local music radio lovers and worth protecting. How did Jameson, who notes she’s on the cusp of millennial and Gen Z, end up with the chops to run this ship?
“I was indoctrinated!” she said with a laugh. “As a teenager, I didn’t necessarily understand what I know about radio and jazz music now, which is that this is, quite frankly, an archival practice of paying attention to this music that has soundtracked American history.
“I always want to be a student, and I think that’s something that my grandmother taught me as a as an educator, so I’d always be open to learning. And so I’m excited to learn more about what this official broadcast media landscape looks like, because it’s really just my first foray.”
She’s only been on the job as music director for one month, but Jameson’s vision for the station would undoubtedly please her ancestors.
“I feel like reorienting, refreshing, but also experimenting,” she said. “The artists that I grew up listening to that my grandparents loved were John Coltrane, Betty Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Abby Lincoln, and there’s certain artists that I would love to hear more of on the station. So just increasing the volume of whom I consider to be classic giants, but also up-and-coming, super-salient young people.
“I do think that there’s somewhat of a comeback happening with jazz. I don’t think jazz ever left, but there’s a reinvigorated interest in the music, and so meeting the moment is what I’m focused on, and providing that education piece. Not only bringing our older generation up to speed, but bringing our younger generation up to speed and being like, ‘This is who you need to know if you’re going to go out in the world and be the artist that you are.’”
For more background on Yonci Jameson and her family, read her October 2024 essay at Sixty Inches from Center.
The post Yonci Jameson brings legacy and experimentation to KBEM Jazz88 appeared first on MinnPost.
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