<\/p>\n
Guitarist Steve Oliver and saxophonist Jeff Kashiwa perform at the 32nd Balcones Heights Jazz Festival at Wonderland of the Americas in July 2025.<\/p>\n
Robert Merrill\/Photo courtesy of the City of Balcones Heights <\/p>\n
Fans sit in lawn chairs at the hillside at Wonderland of the Americas listening to jazz artists performing at a past\u00a0Balcones Heights Jazz Festival.<\/p>\n
Robert Merrill\/Photo courtesy of the City of Balcones Heights <\/p>\n
Thousands of fans sit in lawn chairs at the hillside at Wonderland of the Americas listening to jazz artists performing at a past\u00a0Balcones Heights Jazz Festival.<\/p>\n
Photo courtesy of the City of Balcones Heights <\/p>\n
This Friday night, thousands of smooth jazz fans will fill lawn chairs across the hillside near\u00a0Wonderland of the Americas Mall to enjoy the sounds of the 33rd Annual Balcones Heights Jazz Festival.<\/p>\n
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This year\u2019s festival will open at 7:30\u00a0p.m. with trumpeter and vocalist Ilya Serov followed by headlining saxophonist Tom Braxton at 9 p.m. Attendance and parking are free and open to the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Organizers encourage attendees to arrive early at\u00a0the mall, located at 4522 Fredericksburg Rd. The event is presented by the City of Balcones Heights\u00a0 and iHeartMedia, with catering by Celebrations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Longtime host and emcee David Mu\u00f1oz said he doesn\u2019t consider the festival work, but a labor of love. The host of Smooth Jazz San Antonio on Q101.9\u00a0HD.2 said hosting his Sunday morning jazz show\u00a0for 29 years has allowed him to become acclimated with many artists over the years.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe audience has loved it and we\u2019re excited about this year\u2019s event being another success,\u201d\u00a0Mu\u00f1oz said.<\/p>\n
A labor of love<\/p>\n
The festival\u2019s origin dates to 1994, when\u00a0Mu\u00f1oz and a sales manager met with the general manager at Wonderland of the Americas, then called Crossroads of San Antonio. The brainstorming session launched a multi-week KQ102 Summer Jazz series. In 1998,\u00a0Balcones Heights joined as sponsor of the jazz festival, he said. Since then, the event has drawn\u00a0nearly 2,500 to 3,000 people annually.<\/p>\n
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\u201cPeople literally put their chairs in place as early as the Sunday before the Friday show,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, they\u2019re there five full days before the show date, and the chairs stay in place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mu\u00f1oz also hosts several other jazz events at different venues, including the Big Bib Too Event Center at the corner of Austin Highway and Lanark Drive. The owner, Stanley Shropshire, opened the venue that hosts one national act monthly for two Saturday night shows.\u00a0Mu\u00f1oz\u00a0said recording artists such as Peter White, Rick Braun and Jeff\u00a0Kashiwa have performed at the Balcones Heights Jazz Festival and Big Bib center.<\/p>\n
Baptism into smooth jazz<\/p>\n
A San Antonio native, Mu\u00f1oz grew up on the South Side curious about the smooth transitions from song to song by DJs he listened to on the radio. According to the San Antonio Radio Hall of Fame, the 2021 inductee began practicing his vocal chatter, but stuttering proved a challenge.<\/p>\n
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In 1972, Mu\u00f1oz found help from a speech professor in the Radio-Television-Film department at San Antonio College. She told him that people have so much on their minds that they want to say that comes out faster than their mouths can move. With practice he overcame the speech disorder. In February 1973, \u00a0Mu\u00f1oz worked on the SAC show at KTSA where he learned to become an on-air personality. \u00a0<\/p>\n
In 1974, he moved to\u00a0KTFM, where in late 1975 he was introduced to smooth jazz. Working the midday shift, he played records by popular rock artists, including Aerosmith, Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin. One day, the program manager brought him three jazz albums and asked him to play one song from each record.<\/p>\n
The three artists were saxophonist Grover Washington\u00a0Jr., guitarist George Benson and singer Michael Franks. After listening to a song from each, he discovered \u201creally good music\u201d that led to him spinning tunes by other jazz musicians and bands.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cThat\u2019s how I got what you could call the baptism into smooth jazz,\u201d Mu\u00f1oz said, \u201cand still going at it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Guitarist Steve Oliver and saxophonist Jeff Kashiwa perform at the 32nd Balcones Heights Jazz Festival at Wonderland of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[82,84,83],"class_list":["post-374607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374607","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=374607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}