Getting Into Jazz with Zia Tammami

Tammami's Spontaneous Combustion radio show continues to be one of the best guides to the freedom of expression that we call jazz.

It seemed like a good idea, back then, offering to be a substitute DJ in Zia Tammami's long running jazz show Spontaneous Combustion. I spent a healthy chunk of the late-eighties exploring the stacks of records at KLSU, the mountain range of jazz shelved up outside the production studio wing was particularly daunting. How does one enter that wild and varied terrain without getting lost? How does one get into jazz? Zia has been an expert guide on jazz safari for thirty-five years now, so I asked how he got into it.

"When I was six or seven, my brother took me to see Dizzy Gillespie in Iran, " he replied. Zia grew up in Tehran, attending a prestigious Zoroastrian school that also produced four future Shahs.

"The impression that came from that... it was something that I had to explore. After that we saw the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Mills Brothers, Ahmad Jamal, and Max Roach. I started getting into British rock, listening to North Sea pirate radio on the shortwave, and through that I got into blues, because you know the Yardbirds and the Animals and the Stones were playing that music. We went through the British Invasion backwards to get to the original music."

Zia’s studies took him to Paris, Geneva, Tucson and eventually, to LSU in 1971 where he earned degrees in professional geology and international trade and finance. His personal passion for jazz and blues brought him to the radio station.

"It was May 1977, WLSU 660 AM. The format was blocked programming, specialty shows, but they didn’t have a jazz show or a blues show, so I went and offered to do one,” Zia recalls.

“OK, but we don't have any collection,” he was told, to which he replied, “OK, I can take care of that."

The station changed call letters over the years to WPRG and KLSU with Zia's Spontaneous Combustion as a mainstay. Jazz accompanied by his rich, sonorous delivery is perfect for late night radio, but when he got moved to the morning shift, his format solidified.

"It’s where I came up with the format I have now, with the Latin segment, the Sinatra segment, the blues segment. It became a big hit, and I remember in the early nineties, before everyone was on the Net, KLSU was one of the first stations out there and we started getting calls from all over the country. We used to log all the calls."

Except for a couple of years in the nineties when KLSU went through some format changes, Zia has been playing jazz in Baton Rouge every week for thirty-five years. For as long as I can remember, Zia's theme music has been Quincy Jones' "Killer Joe."

"It’s the old radio [trick of the] trade that people have forgotten. If you want people to make that association with a certain show, you have to have a theme. Why 'Killer Joe'? It’s a very cool song, and it invites you to an adventure or trip. The buildup is slow so I can talk over it and it has a touch of mystery, like an old detective show."

"It's so a part of me. I took my wife and son to Disney and the Navy Jazz Band was playing an outdoor free concert and they start playing ‘Killer Joe’ and I looked to my wife, like, do I need to do something? Do I need to announce something?"

So, that night back in the eighties I pull a few selections off the jazz shelves, the ones that Zia had a hand in filling, to do Spontaneous Combustion. I was a miserable failure. My bebop choices bristled against the Latin numbers I'd selected. Sun Ra proved to be a terrible segue between Horace Silver and Antonio Jobim. I was at sea and the callers let me know that. One guy said, "I have two questions. What are you doing, and where's Zia?" and then hung up.

"The impression that jazz gives you is that it’s very sophisticated, and that if you don't know it, you shouldn’t listen,” notes Zia.  “That’s the image it has. And there is some stuff, some Coltrane, some Ornette Coleman that you might not immediately enjoy, so you start on the softer side. Start with Jazz Crusaders, start with Larry Carlton, start with Sinatra. The key [to bringing listeners into jazz] is how you mix it. That’s the knowledge. I listen to a lot of jazz stations on the Internet, and you can hear that these guys out there focus on only one segment of jazz—big band, bebop, avant garde. Now for you to bring in all that and mix it to the point it appeals to everybody, you’ve got to have the knowledge and good listening skills."

It took me decades of exploration to find out how to get into jazz, where my ears fit in with it. For those of you less interested in jousting windmills and more into actually enjoying music, I asked Zia for a top five “Jazz for Beginners” list. The real stuff.

"Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. It’s one of the most creative improvisations ever. It is user-friendly, easy to listen to. It’s blues-based but introduced something new called modal jazz. All the takes were just one take. Miles came to town and called all the guys and said ‘I wrote all this stuff’—and he wrote for everybody, for the piano and sax and everything—‘I want to see you guys over at Columbia records.’ And he handed them the sheets and they looked at them, and knocked it out in one take. This album to this day in North America, without any advertising or promotional work, still sells 250,000 copies every year.

“The second one parallel to that with some very interesting scales is Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, which features ‘Take Five.’ Then you need a best of Thelonious Monk because it gives you a whole new horizon. My favorite Monk tune is probably ‘Blue Monk’ and ‘Straight No Chaser.’

“In order to complement all this, you’ve got to have a Coltrane, and what I’d recommend is Giant Steps. It’s a must. A nice mix of blues and ballads, straight ahead hard bop and that really gets you to like ‘whoa.’ One of the songs there that kills me is ‘Central Park West.’ Wow. And what a guy! He lived such a short life and in that era recorded so much music in so many styles. The guy practiced all the time, but he was blessed. He spent years with Miles, some years with Thelonious Monk. The guy was incredible. When he came up with Giant Steps, all the critics said his is away from jazz, it’s noise—I mean, look at it now, it’s a classic, but then it was like ‘How dare you.’”

"The fifth one I’d recommend, away from all that is Stan Getz, the Best of the Bossa Nova Years, because that gets you to, like, ‘whoaaaahhhhh.’ The most important thing about jazz is freedom. You look at the history of African-American music—jazz is the final freedom to express yourself."

I don't know if I feel free enough to take another stab at being Zia's substitute, but I do know that his program continues to be one of the best guides to the freedom of expression that we call jazz.

Details. Details. Details.

Every Sunday, Zia Tammami keeps busy with these jazz and blues radio shows:

• Spontaneous Combustion on KLSU 91.1 FM in Baton Rouge or klsuradio.fm, 10 am–2 pm

• Jazz on the Halfshell on WBRH 90.3 FM in Baton Rouge, 3 pm–7 pm

• Dinner Jazz with Zia on KSLU 90.9 FM in Hammond or selu.edu/kslu, 6 pm–7pm