Al Santos Sunday Jazz Brunch

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'Deep Down, I'll Always Be a Disc Jockey'
- Veteran DJ Al Santos Talks About
the Business of Radio

By Christopher M. Wright
© 2006 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved

Listen as You Read

Read about Al's Picks Below

Who says there's too much spin in Washington? Veteran broadcaster Al Santos says there's not enough, at least not enough of the right kind, and he's out to do something about it. Al's roots are in Top 40 radio, where variety ruled the day, providing a listening experience completely different from today's homogenized commercial formats. Al can be heard weekdays on Smooth Jazz 105.9 (WJZW-FM) in Washington, D.C., but his signature show is the Smooth Jazz Sunday Brunch (same station), where he picks most of the music himself. In this interview, Al explains why DJs generally have very little say in what gets played and how the people who really call the shots in radio decide what gets on the air.

AIM: How did you get your start?

Al: That was probably 1966 or '67 when I was in the Air Force and stationed out in Northern California. I used to hang around at this radio station working for free. I begged and made such a nuisance of myself that they finally gave me a one-hour show at midnight on Friday or something. By the end of my four-year hitch in the Air Force, I knew that being a DJ was what I wanted to do with my life.

I got a broadcast engineering license because, in those days, AM radio stations were required to have an engineer on duty at all times. Having a license was very attractive to station owners in small markets because they didn't have the money to pay a DJ on top of paying somebody just to sit there and fulfill a government requirement. So you would work in out-of-the-way markets at ungodly hours to develop your chops. My first Top 40 gig was at WTXL in West Springfield, Massachusetts, near where I grew up.

AIM: Where else have you worked?

Al: Northern California, Texas, Connecticut. I was at WMMR in Philadelphia. It's a sound-alike station now, but back then it was a heritage station and had a real history to it. Let's see, Denver, New York City - "I'm a gypsy man..." [sings]. I've worked for a kajillion radio stations in Washington, D.C. and been at WJZW for the last ten years.

AIM: I used to like smooth jazz, but now it all sounds the same to me. It's no longer an adventure. If I never hear another saxophone solo, it'll be alright. Smooth jazz wasn't always on the radio - how did it get there?

Al: Well, it's kinda like anything else. Once radio owners or managers realize, 'hey, a lot of people like this stuff,' they'll see if they can make a format out of it. I think my Sunday Jazz Brunch at my old station [WLTT] made a couple of radio owners in Washington wonder whether there was enough there to support an audience for more than just five hours on Sunday.

They do all sorts of studies to find out who their audience would be and things of that nature. So we got a jazz station, until the jazz format there got blown up and replaced by an oldies format. Then came my current station, Smooth Jazz WJZW.

I think smooth jazz is running the risk of smoothing itself out of existence, especially because of the instrumentation.
- Al Santos

In the beginning, smooth jazz was - compared to what came before - kind of adventurous, playing all this cool instrumental music. But unfortunately, over the years - and I think the same thing happened to classic rock radio and the album rock stations of the '70s - after a while they sort of squeezed their product to the point where they were just playing the hits and it all sounded the same.

People have often asked 'why do you guys pick one song from an album and beat it to death?' It's not my decision. I think they just want to make one song really familiar so you'll come to the station, hear that song, you'll feel comfortable and stick around. But I always think, maybe naively so, if what you're playing is good, people will stay there regardless if it's familiar or not familiar or whatever. If it's good, they'll stick around, if for no other reason than to hear 'what the heck was that?!' A lot of radio nowadays has lost the 'what the heck was that.' It's kind of like, 'Coming up, a song from Sade...,' 'OK, well let me see, what one of two songs could it be? Smooth Operator again?'

The record library that we have, let's say, has a thousand songs in it. If we have a ratings period which isn't all that good, somebody will say 'let's analyze the thousand songs and get rid of the bottom one hundred.' Now you've got a situation where you're repeating the heck out of songs. Occasionally for whatever reason, you wind up with another bad book, you get rid of another hundred songs and then it's... ah, I don't know.

AIM: Al, you sound frustrated.

Al: The people who choose the format, it's not like they personally want that particular format. They do a lot of research to decide what it's going to be .... If you hear Luther Vandross every other hour, it's because when we do these music tests in focus groups, people react to Luther Vandross, they react to Kenny G. Yah, it's frustrating sometimes.

And there's another problem. I think smooth jazz is running the risk of smoothing itself out of existence, especially because of the instrumentation. Like you said about the saxophone.

Unfortunately, to a lot of people, jazz equals the saxophone. Smooth jazz is at a point where it should really take a serious look at what it's doing. Because it does sound pretty much alike. You've got Dave Koz, Boney James, Kenny G .... Even though they're all distinctive artists, just the fact that they're saxophone players, I mean there's just so many ways you can make a saxophone sound.

Sundays are a little bit different as far as the Brunch goes because I have the freedom to play other things.

AIM: Kinda like Top 40 used to be with lots of variety?

Al: Yah! Back in the olden days, as they say, you could hear Dave Brubeck's Take Five followed by Chuck Berry's School Days, all on the same station and it was goood.

AIM: Right, it was Louis Armstrong's Hello Dolly! that knocked the Beatles Can't Buy Me Love out of the number one slot in 1964.

"If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company.... We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers (sic) products."
- Clear Channel Chairman and CEO
Lowry Mays
in Fortune magazine
A little short-sighted, perhaps?

Al: Exactly. And nobody had a problem with that, I don't think. In the days we're talking about, everybody listened to that radio station. You had teenagers listening, your parents could probably put up with it. But as the years progressed, the people who devise radio formats and do all these focus groups probably decided to go after and superserve one demographic. At some point, somebody said, 'you know, if we could only get the 12-to-24 year-olds listening, we could sell all the pimple cream in the world - OK well, what music do the 12-to-24 year-olds listen to? - let's get a bunch of 12-to-24 year-olds in an auditorium and play them little pieces of music and see which ones they react to the best - we'll have a format that just plays that.' It's pretty much that way now. The 12-to-24's get rock or rap or whatever. Our format is for an older audience; younger people are not that much interested in smooth jazz.

AIM: On Sundays, they turn you loose. How do you put together the Brunch?

Al: Sixty percent of the music that is played on the Sunday Brunch is totally of my choosing. I was influenced by Top 40 and I like to put out as much of a mixture of music as possible and not overlook those old Top 40 instrumental hits from the late 1950s and early '60s.

On Top 40 radio, you could find stuff that you'd go, 'Wow, that was smooth jazz.' Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, not only was it a jazz hit, it was a big Top 40 hit. Cast Your Fate to the Wind by Sounds Orchestral wasn't called smooth jazz back then but, if it came out now, I'm sure it would be an instant smooth jazz favorite. There were a lot of great instrumentals throughout the history of Top 40 radio that I try to incorporate on the Sunday Brunch because I think people who come to the Brunch for something different connect with them. Martin Denny's Quiet Village, that's smooth jazz.

When I schedule the Sunday Brunch, there are three categories - Category 1 which is smooth Jazz, Category 2 which is vocals, and Category 3 which I loosely call 'New Age'.

The Brunch is so hard to categorize. People ask 'what is the Brunch?'. Well, the Brunch is everything - stuff from Asia, the Middle East, New Age pianists.... It's stuff that was a hit before your mother was born.

When I was doing the Brunch at my previous station, I got to pick all the music, for all six hours.

At my current station, they put in four songs an hour of 'their' music - Kenny G, or George Benson, Sade - the stuff you hear every weekday - usually three instrumentals and one vocal. And then I get to pick the other six - there's usually ten songs an hour. I thought 'heck, I don't have to play any jazz stuff, anymore, I'll just concentrate on the New Age stuff.' Not exclusively, because there's so much jazz, and even smooth jazz, that we don't ordinarily get to.

But it isn't so much the Top 40 songs that I bring as it is the Top 40 sensibility - songs that have a nice hook, that move along and make me feel good. I listen to a lot of new CDs and sample every song on each album. If a song stands out and makes me keep listening, I'll add it to the Brunch. So I've gotten this comment a lot, 'god, Al, I went out and bought that CD and the whole album sucked except for that one song!' I'd like to say that on the air sometimes: 'Here's a great track from an album that otherwise sucks....'

AIM: What do you mean by 'hook'?

Al: A 'hook' is the part of a song which is repeated throughout the song... For instance, in the Rolling Stone's song, Satisfaction, the hook would be that part of the song where they sing, "I can't get no (bomp-bomp-bomp) Satisfaction (bomp-bomp-bomp)." It's the part of the song which is the essence of the song... that four or five second 'signature' riff, as it were!

I don't care what instrumentation they have. If they speak to me in some way, then they wind up on the Brunch. I'm starting to find a lot of Middle Eastern music that I like. Whenever I play one of those songs - and this is the Top 40 connection - I think of George Harrison of the Beatles when he was introducing that generation of listeners to the sitar.

AIM: What about Joe Sample and the band he was with in the early '70s, the Jazz Crusaders which later achieved fame as the Crusaders? To me, that's where smooth jazz began.

Al: I'd call that contemporary jazz. It was a bit more accessible to the mainstream than bebop. A lot of times, we'll play stuff on the air and some of the old-timers will call up and go 'Man, that's not jazz. Why don't you play Bix Beiderbecke or Dizzy Gillespie?' We play what we play now because what smooth jazz, like any radio format, tries to do is get as big an audience as possible. If we played hard-core jazz, I don't think we'd get the audience that we have, case in point being the jazz stations in town that are no longer with us, unfortunately. The Doobie Brothers might not be jazz but it falls under the umbrella of 'smooth' and, if it gets us a bigger audience, we'll play it.

Unfortunately, radio's a business, and sometimes we have to go to - I don't want to say the least common denominator.... We like to play a blend of music that will not turn off the jazz people and at the same time maybe bring people who think that jazz is that weird spacey bebop music who will hear something and say, 'wow, I really like that!'.

Everybody wants to make money, the radio stations want to make money, the artists want to make money. Because of the way radio is now, the artists in many cases, I believe, changed their musicality to make it more accessible to be played on the air.

AIM: More commercial?

Al: Yes, and this adds to the 'sameness' of the sound. Every once in a while, there's gonna be a song that will be totally atypical and people will go nuts for it but, for the most part, you've got to have a saxophone and make it sound a bit urban, and all that. They may feel... I don't know if 'pressure' is the right word, but they want to make money, they want to get their stuff played. So they make some artistic compromises, which is not the same as saying they're selling out.

AIM: Thanks for helping us tune in to what makes radio tick.

Al: My pleasure.

Al's Picks

Al has introduced me to some great Adventures in Music - A Childhood Remembered (a Narada collection), Acoustic Alchemy (Nick Webb), and James Asher's Tigers of the Raj. Let's see what he's got up his sleeve now.

Prem Joshua / Dakini Lounge [Prem Joshua Remixed] - "Plays sitar music. It just seems like all the stuff he does, I just love."

Trance Music - "I enjoy trance music, it's Middle Eastern sounding. It's got a real good feel to it. There's a lot of compilation CDs out there that have this type of music." [AIM: Try Tribal Groove (Music Mosaic label)].

Pacific Moon (record label) - "Music from Asia with a contemporary sound, using Asian instruments. A lot of marvelous artists. If I were to pick one, it would be a gentleman by the name of Jia Peng Fang."

Chris Botti - "He's a core smooth jazz artist, but he's an exceptional trumpet player and does some really nice stuff. I can't think of a better version of Sade's No Ordinary Love. I was playing it on the Brunch long before it was released as a single. But there are songs on his albums that are really very good and won't get played on a smooth jazz station."

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