South Bend Jazz Hero
The president and program director of South Bend, Indiana’s WETF-FM, Brent Banulis oversees a 24-hour jazz radio station with a small studio and a global reach. The Hoosier institution, which streams at https://jazzradiowetf.org, offers 168 hours of commercial-free programming each week. With more than three dozen hosts based in 18 different states and Austria drawing from more than 30 collections, the station’s musical mix encompasses a wide array of jazz idioms.
The host of three programs, “Collector’s Choice,” “Big Band Blowout,” and “Saturday Night/Last Call,” Banulis expresses pride that the station reaches jazz fans all over the world. But his hard work at the station is just the latest chapter in his decades of dedication to promoting the art form of jazz. As a resident of East Boston in the late 1990s, Banulis was the driving force behind the formation of the New England Jazz Alliance (NEJA). As the group’s first president from 1999 to 2005, he oversaw the creation of the New England Jazz Hall of Fame in 2001. And NEJA established an Unsung Hero award in 2003 to recognize the behind-the-scenes people who keep the scene thriving. How fitting that he’s now receiving a similar honor as a JJA Jazz Hero.
As a journalism student at Indiana’s Notre Dame University, Banulis played tenor sax in the college band and helped establish the Michiana Friends of Jazz, a volunteer group. He moved to Boston in 1969 to study at Berklee with saxophonist Charlie Mariano, and by 1982 Banulis and his wife Carolyn had settled in East Boston, a convenient spot for his vocation as an editor at the Boston Globe.
Banulis credits a talk on Boston jazz history with jazz trumpeter Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis as a turning point in his activism. “He was a frustrated man standing up there saying this is such a great story to tell and no one’s told it,” Banulis told the Boston Herald in 2002. “I took it to heart. I wanted to get Boston to celebrate its jazz history the way cities like Kansas City and New York do.”
Jarvis died about two years after that lecture, and in a video interview with WCCA TV, Banulis added, “I promised him I would give a portion of my life to founding a New England Jazz Hall of Fame.” He’s been delivering for jazz ever since.
—Leslie Lynnton Fuller
