All That Jazz: KUVO's Carlos Lando on Fifty Years of Making It in Radio

Carlos Lando has been working in radio for fifty years and has interviewed plenty of jazz and blues giants, such as Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie. But his most memorable conversation was with legendary bandleader Count Basie, when Lando was hosting a popular jazz radio show in Puerto Rico. 

"This was 1978, ’79, and Count Basie was flying his orchestra in to the Virgin Islands, to St. Thomas," Lando recalls. "A friend of mine who listened to my show and owned a radio station in St. Thomas said, 'Hey, I want you to come down here and meet the Count. I've known him for thirty years, and he's playing down here.' ... We go to the amphitheater that night, fantastic show. And at the end of the show, right away this gentleman named George says to me, 'We need to go right now to see Bill. It has to happen now or else you won't get another chance.' ... I get whisked backstage, and there's Basie, and George is saying, 'I want you to meet this young man; he loves your music.' I was 28 years old, just staring at him. He's got his cigar and leans back and goes, 'How are you doing, son?' And so I just started asking him all kinds of stuff. I was nervous.

"The most memorable part that I remember to this day was at the end of it," he continues. "I'm trying to run my little cassette recorder, and near the last five minutes of the interview — we were there about ten minutes — there was a big knock on the door. There's a guy outside the door going, 'Please tell Mr. Basie we cannot keep these people out here on the main stage waiting any longer.' They redid the whole stage, and there were all these tables and white cloths and champagne; they were inaugurating the amphitheater, and all these people were there. And Basie's in the back talking to me and his good friend George, who introduced me to him. And that's it. These guys are standing guard outside the door, allowing Basie to give me five more minutes; he already gave me ten. So about the third time there's a knock, a guy opens the door and he's just standing there, doesn't say a word; he just catches Basie's eye. And the Count nods, and he looks at me, and he stands up and he goes, 'Okay, son, let's walk and talk.' And we started walking out of his little confined room. It was like this epiphany. This whole thing hit me, where I knew that as soon as that door opened up and the light came in, I knew that we were a few steps away from the main stage, and that that would be the last time I would ever personally get to talk to or see Count Basie. He shook my hand, smiled with that cigar, and he goes, 'Son, you just keep doing what you're doing. We need people like you to not only remember, but to move the music forward.'"

And Lando's done exactly what the Count said he should do: move the music forward. After 35 years at KUVO 89.3 FM, Lando is stepping down from his position as general manager, but will continue his fan-favorite morning show, The Morning Set With Carlos Lando, which launched in April, and act as an adviser to the jazz station.

His father was in the Air Force, and Lando grew up all around the world, moving from England and Spain to several states before finishing school in Puerto Rico. During 1968 and 1969, he worked for two popular radio stations in Puerto Rico before a brief stint in 1970 as a weeknight host for an underground rock radio show at WOUR in Utica, New York. He moved back to Puerto Rico in the mid-’70s before heading to New York City as a radio producer. By then, Lando had a family and was visiting his daughters and ex-wife in Denver.

"I was not on the air in New York City. I didn't have enough experience at the time, and it was hard to crack that. But I knew I could be on the air in Denver, especially in the areas that I really love, which was music: soul music, blues, jazz and that kind of stuff," he recalls.

In 1980, Lando moved to the Mile High City, where he was hired as a music and program director and mid-day host at soul-music station KDKO. He spent five years there before joining KBCO, and became the program director at KUVO in 1987.

KUVO began in 1985 as an independent public station, started by volunteers who wanted a Hispanic-managed station. While the outlet began with a focus on Latin fusion music, Lando widened that to include jazz, which in turn broadened the station's audience and funding. "When I first took over, the whole thing of Latin fusion everything had really kind of dissipated, and we were not getting the responses that we needed in order to survive being a nonprofit community station," Lando explains. "The reason we needed to go jazz is because Denver has a long jazz legacy. I told Flo [Hernandez-Ramos, who co-founded KUVO and served as its president and CEO for 23 years] that this was our lifeline, that there are literally 80,000 people out there who live, breathe and support jazz in our community in 1987. At least that's what the audience measurements showed us. And so I said, 'We need to grab those. Get those folks in here. And we'll keep our cultural roots. We will help people come to understand what our community priorities are, but under the jazz umbrella.'"

With community outreach and fundraising, Lando not only helped keep the station alive, but it became respected across the country and even across the pond: The U.K.-based Telegraph named it among the best jazz stations in the world in 2005 and 2006. At the same time, it was named Jazz Station of the Year by radio airplay chart JazzWeek. Lando became the president and general manager of the station in 2012, and the next year, the station merged with Rocky Mountain PBS, which expanded its reach and kept the station afloat amid the rise of podcasts and other streaming media. With a greater fan base, in 2019 the outlets created hip-hop station The Drop, to reach hip-hop and R&B enthusiasts and promote local artists within those genres.

“When Carlos first came to us as a program director, it was like he was coming home, because his passion and depth of knowledge about jazz is truly amazing,” says Hernandez-Ramos. “Carlos and his team were able to build significant community relationships, reinvent our format and pull together some very successful fundraising events that literally saved the station. It’s really satisfying to see Carlos transition back into what he truly loves, returning to his roots and focusing on programs that support Colorado’s jazz community and music heritage.”

Program director Max Ramirez wants to uphold KUVO's legacy, but acknowledges that "it's not easy shoes to fill, with Carlos leaving. But what I can do is promise the community that we will enhance the current programming and music that we have, improve the shows that serve the community, and we will move the sound in the progression of jazz that will help us build younger audiences in the future. I promise that even though changes are happening, they are for the progression and for serving the community in the most optimal way we can at KUVO."

 "In our current state, we are in the process of reorganizing and attempting to be sure that each one of our entities, whether it's hip-hop or jazz, that we have a synergy, that we're working together to create content for our city," Lando says. "We all have different levels of roots in our community, and different groups of people that we reach in our community.

"One of the great things about Colorado and living here is that we have such a rich base of music," he adds. "Why KUVO has managed to get accolades is we've always kept an ear to our community. And without that, we wouldn't still be here. We're able to introduce a lot of new music that you won't hear anywhere else. So Max's great challenge right now is to keep new music coming in, satisfying what we have before, but at the same time balancing the classics and understanding that three-fourths of our audience are not hard-core jazz people. These are folks coming to us...because they like something different. You have to diversify a little bit."

Some critics have said that KUVO, which is also known for highlighting local artists, is becoming too mainstream. "As jazz progresses, people's interpretations of jazz stay in which generation they grew up in jazz," says Ramirez. "I'm younger, I'm 34, so my jazz was contemporary fusion jazz, that's my ear. But I can promise that just because I come from a different generation of jazz doesn't mean I won't serve their generation of jazz to the best of my ability. Jazz is diversity; it's a Petri dish of progression in artistic expression and interpretation."

Lando agrees that jazz is simply changing, and while KUVO changes with it, the station's roots are still strong.

"KUVO sounds a little different today and will sound a little different next year and the year after," Lando concludes. "Because that's what music is all about."

The Morning Set With Carlos Lando airs from 7 to 10 a.m. weekdays on KUVO 89.3 FM.