Twenty years ago public radio station KNPR, 89.5FM, began local broadcasts of jazz performances originating from the Four Queens Hotel and Casino in downtown Las Vegas. What jazz impresario Alan Grant started as a six-week trial turned into an unprecedented 15-year run with a 'who's who' of jazz musicians appearing both on the stage and on the air.
On Sept. 18 that collection of 364 hours of performances by Las Vegas jazz giants Joe Williams, Marlena Shaw, Carl Fontana, and other jazz luminaries such as Charlie Byrd, Mose Allison, Lew Tabackin, Billy Eckstein, Woody Shaw, and Bobby Shew will be officially transferred to the Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center at UNLV. The ceremony and reception will be held at 8:30 a.m. at KNPR's Donald W. Reynolds Broadcast Center.
"KNPR is very pleased to be able to make this one of a kind collection of jazz broadcasts available to scholars through the donation of all of our tapes and ancillary material to UNLV's Arnold Shaw Center," said Lamar Marchese, KNPR's president and general manager. "Center Director Ken Hanlon deserves a lot of credit for realizing the value of these tapes in Las Vegas's jazz history. "Former Four Queens executives Jeanne Hood, Ed Fasulo, and, of course, producer Alan Grant deserve recognition for making the series happen. Most remarkable is that over the 13-year history of the national broadcast series 'Four Queen's Jazz Night from Las Vegas' we never had a written contract. It was a handshake deal with folks who honored their word," said Marchese. "The importance of any historical research center is gauged by the portion of its collection that is unique," said Center Director Ken Hanlon. "The one-of-its-kind tape collection of Monday Night Jazz at the Four Queens immediately gives the Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center a very high profile among jazz researchers. It can truly be said that KNPR's donation of this collection to UNLV has put the Shaw Center on the map."
Monday nights were a traditional dark night in Las Vegas lounges so it was Alan Grant's idea to try a jazz format in the now defunct French Quarter Lounge at the Four Queens. Monday night jazz caught on and KNPR began local broadcasts soon after the 1982 launch. In 1983 the broadcasts went national on American Public Radio, now Public Radio International. Within a few years the show was heard on over 150 public radio stations.
In 1988 the series won the gold medal in the prestigious International Radio Festival of New York and was recognized by the Australian Academy of Broadcast Arts and Sciences as the best radio music program. Other landmarks include entry of the program in the Museum of Broadcasting in 1989, carriage on the AM network of Radio New Zealand in 1990, and satellite broadcast of the program in Japan in 1997 and 1998.
With the change of management of the Four Queens in 1997 the program ceased production. The archive of press materials, correspondence, photographs, and contracts, plus hundreds of reel-to-reel audiotape masters, however still resided at KNPR. Discussions began in 2001 about the donation of the collection to UNLV and an agreement was reached in June 2002.
The UNLV College of Fine Arts, department of music, and the UNLV Library jointly administer the Arnold Shaw Center. The center collects, catalogs, and preserves important material in the history of popular music in Las Vegas. As part of the KNPR-UNLV agreement, the Arnold Shaw Center will digitalize the donated recordings to assure the preservation of the contents and make the material available to jazz scholars and other interested academics and the public.
In 1985, author/composer Arnold Shaw founded the UNLV Popular Music Research Center and was its first director. Upon his death in 1989, the center was renamed the Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center in his honor. Shaw's colleague, Bill Willard, was named as his successor and directed the center until his passing in 2000. Shortly thereafter, Ken Hanlon was named the third director of the Shaw Center and in the fall of 2001, the Beam Music Center (BMC) was completed, which included space for the center within the building's music library. Today, the BMC's Shaw Center houses its collection of recordings that includes approximately 20,000 records and over 300 taped interviews of popular music artists. The remainder of the collection of more than 1000 manuscript scores and parts, and miscellaneous memorabilia is housed in the Lied Library Special Collections area, including the music libraries of band leaders Si Zentner and Dick Stabile.
