![\"Kris](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/p26-070-Hillviews-Kris-Kimura13_Web.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWinking, who retired last year, remembers Kimura as \u201cextremely talented and bright, very driven and hardworking.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are certain students who really stand out,\u201d Winking says. \u201cAnd you always think, \u2018Gee, I\u2019m not sure they really got anything from me, but I got a lot out of them.\u2019 And Kris is one of those.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kimura spent more than 10 years at Texas State as he worked his way through school. He\u2019d take off entire semesters to work jobs and save up money for tuition\u2014sometimes embarking for months as a performer on cruise ships\u2014then return to classes for a semester.<\/p>\n
Along the way, Kimura met fellow students who\u2019ve 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\u2019s now the operations manager for Kimura\u2019s clubs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI loved my time at Texas State,\u201d Kimura says. \u201cThey said, \u2018All right, you\u2019re kind of sad. We\u2019re going to make you better.\u2019 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Following college, Kimura worked as a touring musician with numerous groups and formed his own band, the Kris Kimura Quintet, which played the \u201csteak and lobster circuit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cFor about 20 years in Austin, anywhere there was steak and lobster and jazz, you found us,\u201d he says. \u201cOur home base was Eddie V\u2019s 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more successful I was\u00a0becoming as\u00a0a musician, the more time I was going to be away from home,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd so I made that decision. I talked to my band guys, I talked to my wife, I talked to my family.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey believed in me and they gave me the opportunity to build this club, and I\u2019m so grateful for it,\u201d Kimura says. \u201cBut I had no idea what I was in for. It was eye-opening. Now that I\u2019m eight years in, I\u2019m grateful, but I will say the first three years were horrible. I was required to do things that I didn\u2019t know how to do.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s more, Kimura still takes the stage multiple nights a week, performing with the house band as he plays one of his 14 different instruments.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Winking, who retired last year, remembers Kimura as \u201cextremely talented and bright, very driven and hardworking.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThere are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348577,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-348576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}