Company News · March 4, 2008

When Kenny G Was an Urban Artist: How the Smooth Jazz/Urban AC Coalition Formed And Foundered

By Edison Research

In the wake of last week’s defection of yet another high-profile Smooth Jazz station, WJZW Washington, D.C., one thinks again of the paradox of that format in heavily African-American markets. Sharing an audience and music with Urban AC — lots of R&B vocals, including some that may be jazzy but are hardly Jazz — helped Smooth Jazz become more than a niche player in many of those markets. Even in a market like Washington with two entrenched Urban ACs, there were enough African-American quarter-hours to go around.
Even when the format was doing well, however, many Smooth Jazz program directors were publicly unhappy with seeing Smooth Jazz list toward Urban AC — no matter how much better those vocals tested than the format-specific instrumentals. Over the last year, there’s been a lot written about PDs wanting to steer the format toward Triple-A, new pop music, more instrumentals, or anywhere else besides those Al Green and Boyz II Men oldies.
Without knowing the exact thinking behind any recent change at an individual station, it’s easy to see the perception of PPM as unkind to Urban AC as hastening the process. PPM’s effect on Smooth Jazz is still hard to parse. KHJZ Houston is currently within its share range of the last two years – neither huge nor falling off the face of the earth. WJJZ Philadelphia has been slow to get traction since PPM, but is on a new frequency that only recently moved entirely into the market. But if an owner or GM isn’t committed to an older audience or a significantly African-American audience, the specter of a dwindling audience certainly doesn’t help.
That discussion has been playing out in public for a while now. What hasn’t been discussed is how the current coalition took shape–something that happened more than 20 years ago. And it also stems from the relationship between Urban, Urban AC, and Smooth Jazz.
In the early ’80s, of course, there was no Smooth Jazz or Urban AC. There were a handful of commercial Jazz stations, but Jazz/R&B fusion had been a regular part of mainstream R&B radio at least since Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” and Ramsey Lewis/Earth Wind & Fire’s “Sun Goddess” a decade earlier. Jazz producers and superstars such as Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, Al Jarreau, George Benson and George Duke had evolved into R&B hitmakers. Many of the artist/producers familiar to Smooth Jazz fans now – Paul Hardcastle, Najee, even Kenny G — were regular chart presences, heard not just on the “Quiet Storm” that every station had, but also right between the Prince, Midnight Starr, and Patti Labelle records.
Urban radio at that time, of course, included a lot of disparate music. You could hear Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock & Roll” on the early WRKS (Kiss 98.7) New York and through the mid-’80s, Cyndi Lauper and even REO Speedwagon managed R&B chart records. In the years between the first WKTU New York and the launch of WQHT (Hot 103.5), R&B radio was also the starting point for Madonna, Expose, or any other dance artist.
In the late ’80s, that all changed. “Churban” stations forced Urban to focus on its younger end and tamp down its eclecticism. Dance artists had a format of their own in Rhythmic Top 40, as well as a growing foothold at Mainstream Top 40. And the growth of Smooth Jazz eventually siphoned Jeff Lorber, Kenny G, and similar artists and gave them another format to concentrate on. Those artists stopped making music for Urban radio because they no longer had to and, besides, their place next to “Push It” and “Parents Just Don’t Understand” was no longer assured.
The breakthrough Urban AC station, WVAZ (V103) Chicago, was only 18 months behind KTWV Los Angeles, but by the time Urban AC kicked in, the Jazz/Urban connection was already starting to dissolve, even though an occasional Jazz current will still get worked to Urban AC. The music that drove Urban AC was the ’70s slow-jam music that now represents such an issue for Smooth Jazz outlets.
In other words, one of the reasons that it hasn’t been so easy for Smooth Jazz stations to merely segue from Al Green and Marvin Gaye to Mary J. Blige and Alicia Keys (as many Urban ACs have) is that the audience coalition that grew up with both Jazz and R&B as contemporary music was disrupted more than 20 years ago. If you remember “Sexual Healing” and “Sweet Baby” as of a piece, you are almost certainly 45-plus.
That coalition could have conceivably been reinvigorated in the early ’90s when Jazz became the sample of choice for east coast hip-hop for a year or two. But the music being sampled wasn’t the music that Smooth Jazz was playing. It was older jazz that didn’t lend itself to the Smooth Jazz format. The biggest records of that era (“Rebirth Of Slick,” “They Reminisce Over You”) don’t really have a home at any format at the moment, and only the poppiest distillation of that movement, US3’s “Cantaloop,” endures at Smooth Jazz radio.
One irony here is that if Smooth Jazz were willing to show the Urban AC audience a little more appreciation is that there’s actually more opportunity to serve them now. Urban AC radio is both newer these days (the biggest ’70s titles endure but fewer are being passed down through the generations) and increasingly ruled by talk shows, Tom Joyner and Steve Harvey in the mornings, Michael Baisden and Wendy Williams in afternoons. If you want to hear older music, or music period, there are fewer choices.
Again, the goal here is not to second guess any individual decision. Oldies in Washington, D.C., made a lot of sense, too, and involved an entirely unserved audience. Ideally, however, Oldies wouldn’t have displaced a station that did one of the better jobs of making Smooth Jazz a true coalition format in a crowded market. The coalitions that drive any adult format are often 20 years in the making – they aren’t that easily split up and reassembled and Smooth Jazz’s issues today help prove that.
The other opportunity to form a coalition comes when today’s music is powerful enough to transcend the music that many different people grew up with–which means both starting over and claiming ownership of music that could belong not just to one other format (Urban AC) but in the case of today’s emerging adult music, multiple others.
For my colleague Tom Webster’s thoughts on Smooth Jazz, a format that he was heavily involve with for many years, please click here.

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