Winking, who retired last year, remembers Kimura as “extremely talented and bright, very driven and hardworking.”
“There are certain students who really stand out,” Winking says. “And you always think, ‘Gee, I’m not sure they really got anything from me, but I got a lot out of them.’ And Kris is one of those.”
Kimura spent more than 10 years at Texas State as he worked his way through school. He’d take off entire semesters to work jobs and save up money for tuition—sometimes embarking for months as a performer on cruise ships—then return to classes for a semester.
Along the way, Kimura met fellow students who’ve turned into lifelong friends, including pianist Ryan Davis, a longtime collaborator and member of the Parker Jazz Club house band; and Aaron Frescas, a fellow alum of the Bobcat Marching Band who’s now the operations manager for Kimura’s clubs.
“I loved my time at Texas State,” Kimura says. “They said, ‘All right, you’re kind of sad. We’re going to make you better.’ And I feel like they just pulled me up. I was there a long time. I loved my professors, and I loved the students that I went to school with. Going to Texas State really changed everything for me.”
Following college, Kimura worked as a touring musician with numerous groups and formed his own band, the Kris Kimura Quintet, which played the “steak and lobster circuit.”
“For about 20 years in Austin, anywhere there was steak and lobster and jazz, you found us,” he says. “Our home base was Eddie V’s on Fifth and San Jacinto for 14 years. When Three Forks came to town, another steak joint, we were the house band there for almost eight years.”
The band made good money, but it required a grueling schedule with weekly road trips to places like Houston, San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth, and New Orleans. When Kimura’s son celebrated his first birthday, the band was playing seven to 10 shows per week. It was at that point that Kimura told his wife that he was thinking about opening a club to be more present with his family. (Kimura is married to Jennifer Johnson, a singer and the co-director of the Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic at the TXST Round Rock Campus.)
“The more successful I was becoming as a musician, the more time I was going to be away from home,” he says. “And so I made that decision. I talked to my band guys, I talked to my wife, I talked to my family.”
Fortunately for Kimura, one of his fans took an interest in his idea for a jazz club, offering to provide seed money and connect Kimura with other investors.
“They believed in me and they gave me the opportunity to build this club, and I’m so grateful for it,” Kimura says. “But I had no idea what I was in for. It was eye-opening. Now that I’m eight years in, I’m grateful, but I will say the first three years were horrible. I was required to do things that I didn’t know how to do.”
Parker Jazz Club weathered the COVID lockdown and found its groove as an upscale jazz showcase, attracting both local bands and national touring acts like Wynton Marsalis and the Count Basie Orchestra. What’s more, Kimura still takes the stage multiple nights a week, performing with the house band as he plays one of his 14 different instruments.