Al "Jazzbo" Collins

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Albert Richard "Jazzbo" Collins, aka Al "Jazzbeaux" Collins, (b. January 4, 1919, Rochester, New York^[1] — d. September 30, 1997, Marin County, California) was a disc jockey, radio personality and recording artist who was briefly the host of NBC television's Tonight show in 1957.

The name "Jazzbo" derived from a product Collins had seen, a clip-on bowtie named Jazzbows. Just as Martin Block created the illusion that he was speaking from the Make Believe Ballroom, Collins claimed to be broadcasting from his inner sanctum, a place known as the Purple Grotto, an imaginary setting suggested by radio station WNEW's interior design, as Collins explained:

I started my broadcast in Studio One which was painted all kinds of tints and shades of purple on huge polycylindricals which were vertically placed around the walls of the room to deflect the sound. It just happened to be that way. And with the turntables and desk and console and the lights turned down low, it had a very cavelike appearance to my imagination. So I got on the air, and the first thing I said was, "Hi, it's Jazzbo in the Purple Grotto." You never know where your thoughts are coming from, but the way it came out was that I was in a grotto, in this atmosphere with stalagtites and a lake and no telephones. I was using Nat Cole underneath me with "Easy Listening Blues" playing piano in the background.

Collins grew up on Long Island, New York. In 1941, while attending the University of Miami in Florida, he substituted as the announcer on his English teacher's campus radio program, and decided he wanted to be in radio. He began his professional career as the disc jockey at a bluegrass station in Logan, West Virginia. By 1943, Collins was broadcasting at WKPA in Pittsburgh, moving in 1945 to WIND in Chicago and in 1946 to Salt Lake City's KNAK. In 1950, he relocated to New York where he joined the staff of WNEW and became one of the "communicators" on NBC's Monitor when it began in 1955. Two years later, NBC-TV installed him for five weeks as the host of the Tonight show when it was known as Tonight! America After Dark in the period between hosts Steve Allen and Jack Paar.^[2]

In 1959, he was with KSFO in San Francisco. During the 1960s, he was the host of Jazz for the Asking (VOA), and he worked with several Los Angeles stations during the late 1960s: KMET (1966), KFI (1967) and KGBS (1968).

Collins appeared, as himself, as the star of an episode of the science fiction radio series X Minus One.

[edit] Recordings

He recorded A Lovely Bunch of Al Jazzbo Collins on the Impulse label in 1967.

He officially changed the spelling of his name to Jazzbeaux when he went to Pittsburgh's WTAE in 1969. He moved to WIXZ in Pittsburgh (1973) before heading back to the West Coast three years later. While in Pittsburgh, he briefly hosted a late night television show entitled "Jazzbeauxz (yes, he spelled the possessive with the "z"!) Rehearsal". The show had nothing to do with any actual rehearsal, and was entirely an eclectic sampling of anything that caught Collins' interest at the time. One of those "interests" was a long-running hard-boiled-egg spinning contest. He conducted the program from a barber chair, as he had on a previous TV show, a morning program on KGO-TV in San Francisco in the early '60s. He returned to San Francisco in 1976, working at KMPX, followed by a three-year all-night run at KGO. He worked also at KKIS in 1980.

After returning to New York and WNEW (1981), he was back in San Francisco at KSFO (1983) and KFRC (1986). Then came one more run at WNEW (1986-90), and then he joined KAPX (Marin County, California) in 1990, and from 1993 until his death, Jazzbeaux did a weekly jazz show at KCSM (College of San Mateo, California).

At the age of 78, he died on September 30, 1997 of pancreatic cancer.