City | Compton, California |
---|---|
Broadcast area | Los Angeles, California |
Branding | Radio Free 102.3 KJLH |
Slogan |
Total Music Expression Kindness, Joy, Love, and Happiness |
Frequency | 102.3 MHz |
First air date | 1965 |
Format | Urban Adult Contemporary |
Audience share | 2.3 (January 2017, Nielsen Audio[1]) |
ERP | 5,600 watts |
HAAT | 103 meters |
Class | A |
Facility ID | 64639 |
Transmitter coordinates | 33°59′52″N 118°21′32″W / 33.99778°N 118.35889°W |
Callsign meaning |
Kindness, Joy, Love & Happiness (On-air) John Lamar Hill, owner of Angelus Funeral Home (original owner) |
Former callsigns | KFOX-FM KILB |
Owner |
Taxi Productions (Taxi License Corporation) |
Webcast |
MP3 stream (64 Kb) AAC stream (64 Kb) Web player |
Website | kjlhradio.com |
KJLH (102.3 FM) is an Urban Adult Contemporary radio station serving the Los Angeles area. It plays R&B and classic soul music under the format, and occasionally plays some Hip-Hop, Gospel and Smooth Jazz tracks. Licensed to the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, California, the station is owned by Taxi Productions, which in turn is owned by Stevie Wonder. It operates with an effective radiated power of 5.6 kW from a transmitter site in a portion of unincorporated Los Angeles County in View Park-Windsor Hills, and operates from its studios in Downtown Inglewood.
The 102.3 signal was originally licensed to Long Beach, California with the callsign KFOX-FM consisting of a country music format; upon a 1961 sale to the Illinois-California Broadcasting Co., the callsign was changed to KILB.
In 1965, African American businessman John Lamar Hill, then-owner of the Angelus Funeral Home based in South Los Angeles, bought KFOX-FM from the previous owners. It was relaunched as KJLH with a Black radio format consisting of smooth R&B, soul, jazz and MOR music. Not long after Hill took ownership, KJLH's tramsitter was moved from Long Beach to its present-location to better serve the growing African American community in Los Angeles (as well as Compton and Inglewood), and the city of license was relocated to Compton. For years, the station's original studios were based in the Crenshaw district, just north of present-day Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza shopping mall.