March 3, 1978 Gusto feature: Buffalo Jazz Report

 

This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship. See the Footnote. 

March 3, 1978 

Jazz Report: Five years of promising growth 

          The only free-of-charge, full-blown monthly jazz magazine in the U.S. hits the streets with an anniversary issue this weekend, but it won’t be resting on its laurels. Like a strapping youngster that’s outgrown its own back yard, the Buffalo Jazz Report is greeting its fifth year by looking for new worlds to conquer.

          For starters, editor and publisher Bill Wahl wants Cleveland. He and the other half of the Buffalo Jazz Report’s two-man full-time staff, advertising manager Bob Riley, have scouted the territory and it looks good. Starting in April, they’ll give Cleveland the same reviews and features with different covers and different ads.

          “What we want to do is franchise it,” Wahl says. “We’ll get some local people who are interested and we’ll show them how it works. Eventually it’ll be something like Phonograph Record magazine. We’ll ship ‘em the guts and they’ll put their own cover on it.”

          That will be considerably easier than the way Wahl started in 1974, working in the family printing business by day and putting out the Buffalo Jazz Report by night with the aid of his wife Paula. The first issue, a single sheet folded to make four pages, carried only one paid advertisement.

          “When I started out,” Wahl remarks, “everybody told me I was an idiot, that it wasn’t going to last more than a few months. It turned out that we outlasted some of the people who turned us down for ads.”

          After a few months, the Wahls’ labor of love grew to six pages, then eight. In June 1976, it was contracted over to another printer for the switch to its present magazine-size format. For the Christmas issue last December, it swelled to 24 pages for the first time. Wahl’s goal: 32 pages.

          From 3,000 copies of the first issue, the press run has increased to 15,000, which are distributed to more than 200 locations as far away as Toronto, Ithaca, Utica and Erie, Pa. In some places, fans snatch them all up within minutes after they arrive. They can be found at 26 branches of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library and in dozens of record, stereo and music stores throughout Western and Central New York and Southern Ontario.

          “We’ve kept Buffalo in the title,” Wahl says, “because people in Rochester and Toronto put the city down. It makes Buffalo a jazz town for these people.”

           The Buffalo Jazz Report has made Buffalo a jazz town for Buffalonians too. When Wahl started it, jazz was gasping for life here. His intention was to spark some much-needed communication among jazz lovers. His success can be measured in the rebirth of the local jazz scene.

          “Downbeat is for people who are into it,” Wahl says. “This is for people who aren’t necessarily interested in jazz. People just pick it up and start getting into it.”

          “You were one of the influences,” Riley tells Wahl, “that got me into jazz.” Riley, formerly a record store manager, used to advertise in the Buffalo Jazz Report, then started contributing record reviews.

          Like Riley, others have been attracted to the magazine out of devotion to the music.

          There’s reviewer John Hunt, music director for WBFO-FM, who inaugurated the station’s jazz programming. And Toronto correspondent Hal Hill, who has a radio show and runs Coda magazine’s record store on Yonge Street. Reviewer Paul Smith plays avant-garde jazz on WBFO-FM. And Smith’s wife, Sabrina Mayberry Smith, has succeeded Christine Engla Eber as cover illustrator. Eber conceived the magazine’s mascot, Buffalonius, the bearded bison in sunglasses.

          The devotion within the Buffalo Jazz Report has generated devotion among those who read it. Since there wasn’t room to review all jazz releases, Wahl decided from the start to give attention to the good ones. Some jazz lovers began depending on it as a consumer guide. One Rochester radio station went so far as to run a weekly program called “The Best from the Jazz Report.”

          Wahl’s world of jazz doesn’t end at the back page, however. He spreads the news in other ways as well.

          He can be heard piloting a two-hour radio show on WBFO-FM every Sunday at noon (“I don’t believe in taping,” he says. “I always do it live.”) and has promoted a connoisseur’s series of jazz concerts, bringing in Elvin Jones, Dexter Gordon, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Woody Shaw, Phil Woods and Bill Evans over the past four years.

          A Buffalo native, Wahl, 29, started out training for a career in food management, but quit when he found himself putting on too much weight. He was a rock drummer in the late ‘60s and served in the Air Force. The event that changed his life was seeing Elvin Jones play in Toronto. The two drummers became good friends and Wahl was hooked on jazz.

          It’s not an addiction that’s made him wealthy. Quite the contrary. In fact, he hasn’t had a vacation in two years.

          “Just because I’m the editor of a magazine,” Wahl says, “people think I’m rich. I ran into a young lawyer the other day and he says, ‘If I had the money you have, I’d go to the Barbados.’ Paula let him have it.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Bill Wahl, left, and Bob Riley. News photo by Robert E. Stoddard.

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FOOTNOTE: For the Jazz Report, Cleveland thrived and Buffalo bottomed out. The first 58 issues of the Buffalo version, through December 1978, are on file in the University at Buffalo’s Institutional Repository of digital collections at digital.lib.buffalo.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/BuffJazz.

Bill Wahl moved to Cleveland in 1980, recast the magazine as the Jazz & Blues Report in 1987 and went digital in 2003. He also booked a Jazz Report Concert Series into Peabody’s Downunder, the legendary Cleveland rock club. He stopped the print version in 2007 and moved to San Diego. From there he expanded the focus to music news from around the world at jazz-blues.com. The site currently displays a three-page farewell issue, Number 406, dated January/February 2023.

Bob Riley went on to become right-hand man for Tom Calandra at his BCMK recording studio. He also became a close friend of mine, a drinking and golfing buddy. We've had some very good times together.

Bob was my chief science officer on the Lost Expedition, going out on all 38 installments of that epic pub crawl from 1982 to 1986. They included the entire length of Main Street from the Buffalo waterfront to the Genesee county line, all of Oliver Street in North Tonawanda (once was reputed to have the most bars per mile in all of North America) and all of U.S. Route 62 from Niagara Falls to El Paso, Texas, or as close to El Paso as we could get. That turned out to be just south of Buffalo in Blasdell. All of those episodes were reported in Gusto and can be seen on my page at blogger.com. Riley also was my co-author and co-researcher for “A Beer Drinker’s Guide to Buffalo Bars” in 1985.