It’s a sunny late morning at Portland jazz radio station KMHD’s studios, inside the Oregon Public Broadcasting headquarters on Southwest Macadam Avenue. Before our conversation begins, program director Matt Fleeger, who recently celebrated 15 years on the job, is eager to show off KMHD’s renovated broadcast studios and introduce its roster of daytime on-air hosts.
In a living room-like space near the entrance, host Rev Shines, having recently finished a shift on morning show Today’s Good News, is entertaining visitors. Around the corner in a small studio, host Nicole D’Amato is recording a future show. Across the hall in the main studio, Meg Samples is live on the air, able to briefly say hello after playing a song by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk. “This is where all the magic happens,” Fleeger says, pointing out a large table shaped like a grand piano, large enough to accommodate three interview guests, “so you have the feeling of playing while you’re at it.”
There’s plenty of reason to celebrate. KMHD just celebrated its 40th anniversary, having begun at Mt. Hood Community College in 1984. OPB has contracted with MHCC to fund and operate the station since 2009, which is also when Fleeger came on board, so both are celebrating 15 years of success, with ever-increasing listener numbers. It’s also been five years since Fleeger and OPB survived a near-breakup with MHCC, when members of the community college’s board of directors considered bringing the station back to campus, against the wishes of most KMHD listeners and without the financial resources or infrastructure to proceed.
As Fleeger leads me into his office for a longer conversation, there are just as many reasons to look forward as backward. The Portland Jazz Festival is arriving in February, and the station continues in 2025 to roll out new shows and on-air personalities, newly able to pay them. Fleeger, a Pittsburgh native wearing Steelers socks as we talk, has spent a decade and a half remaking KMHD, down to a black and gold graphic identity borrowed from his favorite team.
Oregon ArtsWatch: How did you get involved with jazz radio?
Matt Fleeger: I started working in radio in Pittsburgh, but not a jazz station. Then my wife and I moved to San Antonio, Texas, when she got a job as a park ranger with the National Park Service. I spent the next year and a half trying to break back into radio. There was this station at Trinity University [KRTU] that two acquaintances were preparing to flip from a classical format to jazz. I started volunteering for them, then got a job. I hosted the morning show. Over the years, I just became more and more enamored with jazz and learned so much, because I was programming it five days a week. I started to consult with jazz stations because we had found some success. Plus I had a different sort of mentality of how to program the music.
OAW: And coming to OPB?
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MF: I had read an article in Current, the public-radio publication, about OPB considering taking over operations at Mount Hood Community College’s station because they’d fallen on hard times. I contacted [then-CEO] Steve Bass at OPB and offered my services pro bono. We talked on the phone for four months about what makes a good music radio station, how to program. What I heard in the existing KMHD that might not be resonating with an audience. When they eventually did take over operations of KMHD, I got hired for the station job and moved up here in July of 2009. We started broadcasting out of this facility that August.
OAW: Could you talk about the different sort of mentality you mentioned for programming music, and how that informed KMHD’s “Jazz Without Boundaries” motto?
MF: I think the mistake that I’ve seen a lot of jazz stations make is that they’re too close to the music to be broadcasters. When we talk about broadcasting, we talk about casting a wide net and trying to find a lot of people. Think about it like this: If you’re a baseball fan, and you’re interested in RBIs or other inside-baseball stuff, you would probably think what people want from a baseball [radio] network is all the stats. But that would only appeal to a small segment of potential baseball fans. I don’t think that’s the way to program this music. I think it’s very important to cast a wide net and try and find ways to hook people who might not think or know they like it, then allow them to decide their own path and how deep they want to get into it. So the idea of “Jazz Without Boundaries” is building a jazz station for people who don’t think they like jazz, or might not have had much exposure to jazz.
OAW: How did that approach start to dawn on you?
MF: Aaron Ellington Prado, who was my music director at KRTU, had grown up steeped in jazz, knew it inside and out, knew every member of Duke Ellington’s Blanton-Webster band, and really imparted a lot of knowledge to me, too. But what I noticed — and this is going to sound egotistical, but I don’t mean it to — was that my show was a lot more popular than his, and he was approaching it from an inside-baseball point of view. He was more concerned about the technical ability of the musicians than about whether the music was catchy to listen to on the radio. Because I’d worked in so many different radio formats, I had learned from different program directors and music directors what constituted a radio-friendly sound. It was usually, “Can someone nod their head to it? Can they find the rhythm? Can they find the melody? Can they snap their fingers to it?” Aaron Prado and I had a friendly battle going. When I would play something from, let’s say, Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock, or Eddie Harris doing the soul jazz thing, Aaron would say, “That’s not really jazz. I want you to know that.” I’d say, “Why is this not jazz?” And he would say, “Because jazz should be acoustic instrumentation,” or, “It should have swing.”
OAW: What did you take from those arguments?
MF: What I realized through these conversations that went on for probably eight to nine years is that while Aaron could argue what jazz wasn’t, he couldn’t define what jazz was, despite being steeped in it. He’s a jazz piano player. His dad was a famous bassist in San Antonio. But even Aaron, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, could not put his finger on an actual definition of the music, which then became this light bulb in my head, where I was like, “Wait a minute, if you can’t define it, nobody can.”
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OAW: How did that continue when you got to KMHD?
MF: I started to pose this question to musicians. Sometimes, it’d be a great musician like Kenny Barron visiting the studio. I’d ask, “How do you define jazz?” With each person I talked to, they couldn’t do it. I realized jazz must be undefinable. Improvisation is part of jazz, for example, but not all the time. There’s some great jazz that’s written out. I realized it’s about artist intent. If the artist intends what they’re doing to be jazz, then it must be. But even that’s not full-proof. Sometimes we have artists from the past that didn’t think of themselves as jazz artists, but it clearly, to our modern ears, sounds like jazz. At KMHD we program that alongside real-deal jazz, and thus continually expand an audience’s horizon.
OAW: What push-back have you received?
MF: When I came here, I told them, “We will know this is working if we start pissing off a lot of jazz purists.” I told both Steve Bass, who’s just retired, and [station manager] Lynne Clendenin, who retired a couple of years ago, “I want you to ride with me on this. If you start hearing complaints like, ‘This isn’t jazz, this is funk, this is R&B,’ I want you to know that’s going to mean it’s starting to work.” And what “work” meant in this case was not talking to a 60,000 or 70,000-person audience a week, but double that audience. And that’s what we saw start to happen within the first five to six years. The audience doubled. And then over the pandemic, everything changed.
OAW: How so?
MF: The business model basically for KMHD up until the pandemic was that we had myself full-time and two other full-time employees that hosted AM and PM drive, and that was it. The rest of the DJs volunteered their time. I had never been in agreement with the volunteer-DJ model. I think that people should be paid, especially on a station where we expect so much and we expect such a high threshold of professionalism, of creativity and engagement from our hosts. During the pandemic, all of a sudden we lost the ability to come into these studios. It became very dangerous to continue to host shows. This happened, like, overnight. We had to figure out a way to basically pre-record shows at home and drop them into the system remotely. Most of our volunteer DJs faced a choice. Do they want to start pre-recording or do they need to retire their show?
Now, the one good thing that we had done prior to the pandemic is we had recorded all these evergreen programs: pre-taped shows that could run at any time. So during lockdown, we could start running those immediately. But we needed fresh content, too. So then we hired two more part-timers. We now had five people that could produce content at home. And we were basically the ones programming the station through the first five to six months of the pandemic.
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OAW: Then what?
MF: Something exceptional happened in the summer of 2020. The Doris Duke Foundation invited KMHD to participate in this Jazz Media Lab program: taking the top-five-rated jazz stations in the United States — New York, Philadelphia, Denver, Portland and Seattle — and giving give each a quarter of a million dollars for operational costs. They also connected the five stations into a cohort to talk about ratings, audience development, trends. When we received this, I pitched to OPB going to an all-professional staff. And so this became what I call our producer model. We have a number of independent contractors from whom we purchase intellectual property, i.e. radio shows, on an episodic basis. They own the show. They have full creative control.
OAW: How does one become a DJ now?
MF: Anyone can pitch a show to KMHD. We ask that they submit a pilot. If it sounds like something that will work for us, we say, “Yeah, let’s roll that. We’re into it.” We develop a yearlong contract with them, and they can submit up to 52 episodes per year, which we pay about $60 an episode for. And that’s worked out really well. All the shows you hear post-7:00pm in the evenings are these producer-model shows. They’re all people out there in the community and some people elsewhere. We have a constant rotation of these people coming in.
OAW: There was a point where I realized almost all the shows that I had originally become a fan over the past decade had gone away: Tim DuRoche’s The New Thing featuring free jazz on Monday nights, Scott Thayer’s The Deep Dig on Thursdays focusing on record-store finds, Andrew Dowd’s three-hour bloc of midcentury jazz The Gold Standard on Saturdays. But it’s been fun and exciting to hear new voices, like Manteca for Latin jazz on Wednesday, Arrivals featuring Asian jazz on Thursdays, or The Headnodic Show on Fridays with its danceable grooves, followed by The Archive with local-music rarities. It also seems — though I’m only guessing here — that the roster of DJs and their shows have become more diverse.
MF: I believe that this music to be presented authentically needs to have the voices of the cultures that gave birth to the music. We’ve always been trying to find diverse voices. The problem is that when you’re not paying someone, you’re basically at the mercy of who has the ability and time to do it. Once we started paying people, we could make a more concerted effort. I want a place at KMHD for every culture that’s had an imprint on jazz. That’s why we have a show that examines music of the Caribbean. We have a show that examines pure Latin jazz through a Chicano culture. We have a show that examines the Asian diaspora of jazz. We have a number of shows with Black hosts, because that is the culture that gave birth to this music. So yeah, there was a concerted effort. There always had been. But it was easier once we could pay people. Because not everybody can work for free, and maybe that’s a little bit of white privilege at work: that it tends to be white people that can work for free. I feel like we still have a long way to go to get as diverse as we need to be, to have the sound I want on the station. But we are better than we ever have been in that regard. I’m proud of that.
OAW: What’s a new show you’re excited about?
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MF: Zoot Pursuits, a straight-ahead jazz show through the perspective of the five senses. One time Blaire might be focused on a taste, and another time she might be focused on a color. I’m really excited to start exposing that show to the audience because I think it’s going to be a big hit. It’s very good.
OAW: You weathered the pandemic and came out better for it. But before that, in 2019, you had to survive OPB potentially losing KMHD: an end to the operating agreement with Mt. Hood Community College, which owns the station’s license. What do you take from that?
MF: The [2009] contract had specified that we would do this for ten years, with a five year auto-renewal at the end of that 10-year period. In 2018, a couple of members of the community college’s board said, “We want to take this thing back.” We were surprised. And this began a battle, not between OPB and the community college, but between the community that supported KMHD and Mt. Hood. People were writing letters and going to board meetings and speaking out. I think the president at the college, Lisa Skari, saw from an administrative standpoint what they were getting out of this arrangement and how difficult it was going to be to bring KMHD back to the campus: how much it was going to cost, how much infrastructure work they were going to have to do. There were about three months of pretty uncertain times. But interesting things came out of it. We heard how much this product and programming meant to our audience. I think the CEO here at OPB really saw the place that KMHD occupied in the zeitgeist of Portland.
OAW: Where do things stand now?
MF: We have just signed, as of this last summer, a new 10-year agreement with another five-year option. So the station will be here through at least 2034 and in theory, 2039. It is a quite a big deal.
OAW: And you’ve already been here 15 years.
MF: I never thought I’d work anywhere 15 years in my life for a single entity, but I this is more than a job to me. I’ve had the ability to have creative autonomy with a radio format. I’ve done what I wanted to do. I’ve been remodeling the station since 2009, and over the past year, it’s finally gotten to the point where I feel like the house is remodeled, like it’s ready to show now.
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OAW: What about the DJ in you? You were doing New Jazz for Lunch weekdays at noon, but that was replaced by Alex Newman’s The New Format, while you host an early evening show, Moodsville.
MF: I felt like New Jazz for Lunch should be hosted by somebody young who has the ability to get out and be in the community a little bit more. So that’s when I plugged Alex Newman into that show. I still loved new jazz and doing that show, but as my spiritual growth has continued, you might say I wanted a place where we could have some really quiet moments that were healing for people and I could demonstrate that trajectory of the music through the ages. How we can take it from Duke Ellington to Earth, Wind and Fire to Joe Armon-Jones to the Ezra Collective and beyond? The concept of Moodsville is a place for people, at the end of maybe a long or stressful day, to come back.
This is what we realized about the audience. During the pandemic, our time-spent listening went to the highest in the Portland radio market. I talked to my DJs about this: “We’re changing a little bit. I don’t want as much like energetic-ness that we would typically do in drive times. I want things that are healing, that feel sweet and powerful. I want to relax people.” Because it was very tense during the pandemic. There was a lot of uncertainty. The news wasn’t good. We were also still in the first Trump administration. We knew we needed to be a yin to the yang of OPB. Right. We knew what was happening with the news, and the fatigue that was occurring. We were like, “If we can be the soft landing good. Let’s do that.” And so that’s how the programming maybe changed a little bit. When I talked to the staff at programming meetings, I said, “Our number-one job is to make people happy. Do not ever give them anything that could not make them feel better about their day.” That’s the goal.
OAW: During the pandemic KMHD also eliminated the hourly drive-time news bulletins.
MF: We had three morning news updates at 7, 8, and 9, and then afternoon news updates at 3, 4 and one at 5 pm. Basically a piece of NPR’s All Things Considered, and a piece of the local news broadcast from OPB. During the Trump years, it was so offensive and it so diametrically opposed to the sound of the music that we were putting out. You’d have like Trump speaking and then, “Here’s some John Coltrane.” It just felt schizophrenic. I had to work pretty hard to petition OPB to let us take them off. I came with ratings demonstrating that people were shutting off the radio during the news broadcast and letting them hear samples, where the news talked about 70 dead and then we’re trying to get back into some beautiful music. Finally they acquiesced. And our time-spent-listening stats for those shows [when the news updates occurred] has increased since then.
OAW: Even with so many new shows, since the July 2021 death of longtime KMHD host Carlton Jackson you’ve been re-running his show, The Message, on Sunday nights. Could you talk about that?
MF: Carlton’s death was really tragic: unexpected and sudden. He was a very important person to the station and its development. Carlton was on KBOO when I first moved here. He was filling in on Eugene Rashad’s show. I had wanted Eugene as a host here, but I could not get him to commit. Instead he said, “Maybe you should talk to Carlton.” I met Carlton at an art show and invited him to the office. I figured out really quick, this guy had lived a charmed, exceptional music life. He had all this knowledge that he was imparting to me about how his community, his historic Black neighborhood in North Portland, was being gentrified. I said, “Your show just sounds like it should be about this: about your perspective as a musician, growing up in this community.”
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The show’s title was inspired by my father-in-law, who is responsible for my jazz knowledge. He owned one of the very few African-American ad agencies in Philadelphia. He grew up in Spanish Harlem and came up as a Black man in the 1960s on Madison Avenue in New York. He designed album covers on the side throughout his life, for Fania Records for Pucho & his Latin Soul Brothers, for Mongo Santamaría, all kinds of different people. My father-in-law always told me, “This music is message music. Even if it’s instrumental, there’s a message in the music.” I told Carlton that, and he was like, “Yeah, we’ll call it The Message.”
OAW: I will always associate Coltrane’s classic ballad “Naima” with Carlton’s show, because he always began with that song.
MF: Do you know why he did that? He would play in a church band, and sometimes the service was going too long. So every week, we would just plug that in to run. And so if he was rolling late, he could come in at any point of that song and get ready to go on the air.
OAW: What does rebroadcasting the show say about Carlton, your relationship and your philosophy?
MF: I’m getting chills thinking about this. I don’t think I can ever take that show off the air. Carlton left us every one of his recordings for the program, and he recorded a number here. He would come in on Fridays and have lunch with us. He was a close friend, and I got to see him drum so many times throughout his life. As long as that show’s on the air, his spirit is still here.
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OAW: You’ve mentioned spirituality a couple times as a guiding force. You clearly see that in the music and the station.
MF: There’s this thing about radio waves. They originate here on the planet, but eventually they make it out of the ionosphere and continue out into space. So when I first started talking on the radio back in 1994, it’s somewhere at the outer reaches of our solar system right now. And so, when I keep Carlton on the air, I know those waves are making it out there somewhere, and he’s just permeating the universe. We all are. Every time we broadcast. That’s important to me.
