Anyone who has strolled the San Antonio River Walk has likely caught a snippet of Cullum playing with his seven-piece ensemble, The Jim Cullum Jazz Band. Since 1963, the group has stayed faithful in performing classic traditional jazz at its home club, Jim Cullum’s Landing.

Pilgrims on a quest for pure classic jazz, many in the audience have traveled from distant lands to hear the band because of their devotion to Cullum’s 20-year-old radio series: “Riverwalk Jazz,” which presents live recorded performances of the band from the Landing. Every week, the show is broadcast on 150 public radio stations from San Francisco to Chicago to New York, in addition to being heard on XM satellite’s Real Jazz channel. Weekly shows can also be streamed through the show’s website.

From the stage to satellite, Cullum is keeping alive the sounds of greats such as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington. In its prolific history, his show has attracted the likes of Grammy winners, trumpeter Benny Carter and Joe Williams, who sang with Count Basie.

“[Cullum’s] radio show is one of the very few sources that keeps traditional jazz before the public,” says Dick Hyman, a pianist and frequent guest of the show. “I value it for the fact that the music is being played, not just being replayed on old recordings.”

The Making of a Band
Before the jazz world knew Cullum, his music captivated Alamo City locals. Although he didn’t pick up an instrument until his teens, jazz permeated his entire life. Now 67, he says his first memory is of being a 4-year-old and peeking into a smoky living room to hear the clarinet and saxophone versatility of his father, Jim Cullum, Sr. “The earliest thing I can remember is being awakened in the deep middle of the night by a downstairs jam session of live musicians playing and jamming,” he recalls.

Today, in the living room of his Spanish-inspired home tucked in a woodsy area outside the urban Brackenridge Park, Cullum revs up a vintage, 78 rotations-per-minute record player. He listens to the snappy styling of trumpeter Bunny Berigan as he describes how he became immersed in jazz as a 12-year-old who had just moved to San Antonio from his hometown of Dallas. “I knew it was a joyous music, a make-you-feel-good music, and so I began to listen to my father’s records at that point,” he says. “He had stopped playing and had been through all the ups and downs of the music business.”

Cullum began to memorize tunes and whistle the solos of his cornet hero Bix Beiderbecke and renowned trumpeter, Louis Armstrong, whom his father had the privilege of jamming with during his own career. Still, the independent adolescent never asked his father to give him lessons. “I began to have the idea that I wanted to play some kind of instrument,” Cullum says. “It was my little secret.”

While the Alamo Heights High School student worked part-time for a delivery service, a cornet in a pawn shop window in downtown’s Houston Street caught his eye. “The price was $12. It was pretty beat up, so I went back and haggled with the guy and bought it for $7,” he says.

Cullum and a few of his friends soon had a few gigs outside a Dairy Queen on Austin Highway where they got paid with hamburgers and shakes, and they worked themselves up to performances at the San Antonio Country Club. “I had no instruction whatsoever,” he says. “I played along with records and started learning songs.”

The Band Finds a Home
As Cullum’s playing progressed, his father began noticing his talent. “He was busy and began to come and give us some pointers,” he says. “We welcomed it because he was a great musician.”
The elder Cullum started playing with his son every Sunday at a club in the city of Castle Hills, just outside San Antonio. Cullum’s mother collected $1 admission, and sometimes the father and son had to dig into their own pockets to pay the other musicians the union rate of $12.

Cullum, a 21-year-old student at San Antonio College and Trinity University, ran the Happy Jazz Band on stage while his father handled the business aspects. They got their big break when River Walk development pioneer, David Straus, invited Jim Cullum, Sr., to open a club along the corridor which, at the time, had only one other business.

With the investment of trombonist Jim Hayne and 20 others, the Landing opened in 1963. From the early years, Cullum remembers the long lines of fans and visits by Doc Severinsen, a trumpeter who eventually became famous as the leader of the NBC Orchestra on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” “It was a much more high-powered gig,” he says. “We really had a venue then.”

Cullum still looks adoringly at a copy of a black-and-white photo of the original Landing location, arranged with quaint café tables and stage canopies. The space, with its concrete columns, was originally built as a garage. “We fixed it up, it was really clever, very charming,” he says. “The Casa Rio restaurant was at one end, and we were at the other end.”

For 10 years, the father and son and their band entertained locals and grew with the River Walk’s popularity. “He started having so much fun,” Cullum says of his father. “It was the time of his life.”

River Walk Crusade
Then, major events forced Cullum to adapt. In 1973, his father passed away, and he changed the band’s name to The Jim Cullum Jazz Band. And when the Landing’s lease expired in 1974, Cullum moved it to another locale across the river.

In 1982, Cullum snagged the opportunity to take The Landing to a prominent location along the indoor river walkway that connects the Hyatt Regency to Alamo Plaza. With its glass windows above the stage that remove the need for amplifiers, the venue is built for acoustic jazz. Those same glass windows invite passersby to peer into the club and see Cullum’s band performing.

The intimate 140-seat space, with snuggly placed seats on the floor and balcony, allows for Cullum to speak in conversational style, introducing the songs and occasionally making wisecracks. He stresses that the band members approach the classics with their own style. “We reinvent the song, so it’s the same tune, but it’s highly improvisatory,” he says.

Cullum, majority owner and president of American Jazz Corp., which owns the club, is adamant about his band exclusively playing pre-World War II jazz, which spans from the 1920s to 1940s. “Ours is more of a purest approach,” he says. “It keeps its integrity.”

One thing he regrets has changed is the presence of national chains on the River Walk. In 1969, he served as the first president of the Paseo del Rio Association, a group of River Walk businesses, and sat on its board for many years. He hopes the River Walk doesn’t lose its local character in much the way New Orleans’ Bourbon Street has.

“It’s a little bit of what we’re seeing on the River Walk, that is, as time went by, the property values in New Orleans became so valuable that you couldn’t run the kind of venue like the Landing and make it,” he says. “So they started dropping off.”

Fans of The Landing will be happy to know that its lease with the Hyatt doesn’t expire until 2022. “The main crusade I’ve been on is not to see the River Walk devalued,” Cullum says.

Keeping Jazz Alive
In 1963, if San Antonio jazz fans weren’t spending late nights at The Landing, they were probably listening to the Happy Jazz Band on a 30-minute live broadcast from the club. With no-frills production, the band would hear its cue from the DJ on the radio. “We would wait for the DJ to say, ‘And now we take you live to The Landing,’ and then I would point to the drummer, and we started playing,” Cullum says.

The show started on FM radio, which few people listened to at the time, then moved up to WOAI-AM and returned to an FM station. After a hiatus in the 1970s, the show was aired locally in the 1980s.
In 1988, Cullum pursued bigger plans for the show. His agent called producer Margaret Pick of PVPMedia in California to take the show nationwide. Pick, who is still executive producer of the show, remembers how she and Cullum connected. “I flew down to Texas uncertain as to what I would be able to do, but once I heard the authenticity and musicianship of The Jim Cullum Jazz Band, I was sold,” she says. “The band’s musical arrangements are extraordinary, their playing is solid, and Jim embodies early 20th century jazz in a way that no one else around does.”

In 1989, “Riverwalk Jazz” was picked up by 60 stations. Since the mid-90s, the one-hour show, distributed by Public Radio International, runs 52 weeks a years. It features live recording productions, compilation shows and reruns.

Through the music of The Jim Cullum Band, guest performers and storytelling by co-host David Holt, the show focuses on a theme such as how Kansas City jazz influenced rock-n-roll or the story of a particular performer. Holt, who has won Grammy awards for folk music and storytelling, says the show brings history to life through its live performances, interviews of jazz icons and actors who portray historical jazz figures.

“It’s not just a museum piece,” says Holt, a 62-year-old Central Texas native. “We’re not just duplicating some old recording and making it sound just like it did in the old days. It’s a living kind of music, and I think Jim thinks of it that way and presents it that way. It’s still vibrant and still relates to people today, and that comes across in his playing.”

The non-profit entity, Riverwalk Jazz, supports the production, owns the archives, runs the Web site and raises funds for the show that boasts 225,000 weekly radio listeners, 20,000 monthly Web listeners and an immeasurable satellite audience. Cullum says the show has given jazz “a big charge,” but as time goes by, the genre’s fans could dwindle to a dedicated base in much the same way Bach has its devotees. “There are always going to be this small, intellectual group of listeners who are going to find these art pieces and become so obsessed by them,” he says.

As for Cullum’s own three children and three stepchildren, all appreciate his music, but none are musical performers. It’s too early to tell if any of his three young granddaughters will pick up an instrument.
Cullum says he doesn’t think in terms of legacy, but just does what he does. “My biggest goal is to refine my own playing,” he says. “That’s what I’ve been working on my whole life.”