KAZI 88.7 FM Moves to New Location, Expands Offerings

Reno Dudley didn’t know the sign was going up when he walked into the Austin Community College Highland campus one day in May. On his way into the studio, he just happened to catch those big, bold letters finally going up on the outside of the building: KAZI 88.7 FM.

"I sat there and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, we really did this," Dudley said. "‘We really pulled this off.’"

The sign reveal was the last step in a 6-year transition for Austin’s only Black community radio station. The station, which is funded through donations and grants, did a fine job producing a blend of fresh music and educational talk shows from its old location in East Austin. But Dudley – the station manager, who oversees a team of five paid employees — said the ACC location primes the station to start expanding.

"You walk in, and it's just a different air," Dudley said. "It’s a new place that’s designed for that, with the podcast studio in the back. As we look to branch out KAZI into different arms aside from being just radio, we have the ability and the facilities to do it."

In comparison to the old location, the ACC studio has more space, better equipment and soundproofed rooms.

"It’s like moving from an apartment to a house," KAZI program director Cedric Turner said.

The ACC location isn’t the only new thing the station has been working on. Dudley is also introducing a system where the station will go through a "refresh" every six months as the public can submit their own show ideas.

Before, the program schedule would stay the same year after year because adding a new show was contingent on waiting for someone to leave so the time slot would open up. As a result, there was a backlog of people who had show ideas but couldn’t get on the air. When Dudley became station manager in September 2024, he saw an opportunity to increase diversity among talk show hosts and music genres.

One of the new shows that got added just before the location change is Traffic Jam, which goes from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and is run by Chas Moore. While Moore mostly mixes music for the show, he also does the headlines for local, national and global news. For him, it’s a good way to bridge the lighter side of KAZI and his activism as the founder of the Austin Justice Coalition.

Although KAZI’s shows don’t push political opinions, they do promote civic engagement through education.

"The fact that people trust me and they want me to talk about certain things means the world to me," Moore said. "Something I thought I would just be doing for a couple months, like now I look forward to every day."

While KAZI has an eye to the future, it is still connected to its roots. Natomi Blair, the station’s chairwoman of the board, hosted the morning show "Wake-Up Call" for 10 years, a show originally hosted by the station’s founder John Warfield.

For Blair, KAZI was one of her first introductions to Austin when she moved to the city in 2006. She would begin hosting "Wake-Up Call" only two years later, becoming one of the first women to ever host the show.

It was that long-time connection to the station that Blair advocated for the location change when the idea first came up in 2019. She described it as "future-proofing" the station.

"We needed to take this opportunity to have KAZI rise to the occasion of its legacy," Blair said. "We have been in Austin for almost 43 years, and we want to be a true reflection of our legacy."

Out of those 43 years, KAZI’s technical manager Marion Nickerson has been around for all of them, minus a couple days. He began volunteering at the station only days after it first started airing in 1982, running errands and cleaning equipment. He ended up serving as station manager twice before handing off the position to Dudley.

Between having kids, grandkids and another job at Austin Community Television, Nickerson still found time to volunteer at KAZI.

"Management could always count on me to help out wherever they needed help because I just enjoy doing it," Nickerson said. "Plus, I was like any other DJ — I like hearing myself on the radio."

In the last several decades, Nickerson is the one who has seen the station evolve from its earliest roots. He remembers when KAZI would play exclusively R&B and jazz instead of the mix of hip-hop, rap, blues and even Bollywood that it plays today.

While Nickerson has been around since the beginning, he has never been afraid of what the future holds. For most of its time on the air, KAZI has only had a 30-mile radius, in comparison to bigger stations like KUT, which has a range of about 97 miles.

Despite its smaller size, KAZI has managed to stay afloat due to consistently working with growing local artists and adapting to new technology. In his second stint as manager in 2022, he supervised the station’s transition to social media and streaming platforms to reach a wider audience. Now with the help of the new studio, he’s involved in KAZI’s expansion into podcasting.

"We made those necessary changes to go to different platforms," Nickerson said. "Our listeners are so loyal, so once they latch on to a genre, because we play eight different genres of music plus our talk shows, we offer something for everyone."