Three years after the sudden death of longtime radio host Catt Sirten silenced one of Mobile’s most cherished weekend traditions, the sound of live jazz is coming back to Southwest Alabama airwaves. Station officials at 92 ZEW (WZEW) have announced that the Sunday Jazz Brunch will return this Labor Day weekend, reviving a broadcast that entertained local listeners for decades before going dark in August 2023. For a station whose identity was built in large part on the program, and for an audience that organized its Sunday mornings around it, the return is less a programming change than a restoration.
The show will resume on Sunday, September 6, running from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and will once again be broadcast live from a downtown Mobile brunch venue. This time, the program will originate from Penton’s Bistro at 219 Conti Street, placing the revived broadcast right in the heart of the city’s historic downtown district. The remote setup — hosts on the microphone, kitchen and dining room working around them, music filling both the room and the airwaves — was always part of what made the Jazz Brunch feel like an event rather than a playlist. Listeners who want to be in the room can make a brunch reservation and sit inside the broadcast itself.
Honoring a Mobile Radio Legend
Catt Sirten was a fixture of local radio for more than 40 years, delivering over 2,000 broadcasts across a career that included the original Jazz Brunch, along with fan-favorite programs such as Radio Avalon and Brown Bag in Bienville. Few local broadcasters have shaped a city’s listening habits so deeply for so long. His shows introduced generations of Mobile listeners to jazz standards, smooth jazz, and the musicians who moved between the genres, always delivered in a voice that was as much neighbor as disc jockey.
Beyond his work behind the microphone, Sirten played a key role in helping establish 92 ZEW as a station, leaving a lasting mark on Mobile’s broadcasting landscape. He was there in the station’s formative period, and his programs became part of its programming spine — the weekend blocks that listeners set their clocks by. Radio Avalon and Brown Bag in Bienville carried his sensibility into weekday listening, but the Sunday Jazz Brunch was the flagship: four hours of music and mellow talk that turned a radio show into a Sunday-morning institution.
When Sirten died unexpectedly on August 6, 2023, while in the midst of producing his Sunday show, listeners across the region felt the loss deeply. The circumstances — a broadcaster who died at work on the program that defined him — made the grief personal for an audience that had spent decades of Sunday mornings with his voice. Station officials chose not to recast the show immediately, and the slot went dark, leaving a quiet four hours where a generation of Mobilians had been used to hearing music chosen by someone who genuinely loved it.
Mobile later held a jazz-infused Celebration of Life for Sirten at the historic Saenger Theater, where members of the Mobile Big Band performed in his honor under the direction of his close friend, Chip Herrington. The Saenger — the city’s restored 1920s movie palace on Joachim Street — was the right room for it: a landmark venue filled with the music he spent his life championing, played by the city’s own big band, for an audience of the listeners he had fed every Sunday for decades.
A Friend Steps Up to Carry the Torch
That same friendship is now the foundation of the show’s return. Herrington, a Mobile attorney by trade and the conductor of the Mobile Big Band, shared a 30-year friendship with Sirten and has long been immersed in the same jazz tradition that defined the original broadcast. Station officials say bringing Herrington on board to host the reborn Jazz Brunch felt like a natural fit, both musically and personally, given how thoroughly he and Sirten shared that world — the records, the musicians, the local scene and the conviction that Mobile deserved a Sunday program built around the music.
Herrington’s credentials run deeper than fandom. As conductor of the Mobile Big Band, he leads one of the region’s most active jazz ensembles, keeping the big-band repertoire alive on local stages and at civic events across the Gulf Coast. His day job — a career as a Mobile attorney — makes him an unusual radio host by the standards of the industry, but exactly the kind of host the show’s tradition calls for: someone whose knowledge of the music and of the city comes from a lifetime in both rather than from a program director’s playlist.
For the station, the decision to revive the show under a hand-picked successor answers the question that hung over the program’s future for three years: whether the Jazz Brunch was inseparable from the man or larger than him. The answer the station landed on was the latter — that the show is a Mobile institution worth continuing, provided it stayed in hands that understood what made it matter.
Labor Day Weekend and the Return
The timing is fitting. Labor Day weekend is the unofficial close of the Gulf Coast summer — the last long weekend before school routines harden, and a holiday that jazz has always scored well. Reviving the show on the Sunday of that weekend gives the return the feel of a season-opener: old listeners coming back out of loyalty, and new ones discovering a program that has run, in one form or another, for most of the station’s life.
Penton’s Bistro, at 219 Conti Street, puts the broadcast a block off Dauphin in the heart of the Lower Dauphin entertainment district, inside the downtown blocks that have rebuilt themselves around restaurants, music venues and street life over the past two decades. A live remote in that room doubles as a small act of civic promotion — the radio show showcasing the downtown brunch scene just as the downtown brunch scene hosts the radio show.
Station officials have framed the revival as both a continuation and a tribute. The format — four hours, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., live music-forward programming from a downtown venue — follows the template Sirten built. The voice on the microphone is new, but it belongs to someone who spent thirty years in conversation with the man who built the show, and who led the musicians who played him out at the Saenger.
Why the Show Mattered So Much
Local radio programs that run for decades do something national playlists cannot: they become part of the rhythm of a place. The Sunday Jazz Brunch was the soundtrack of specific rituals — Sunday breakfasts, drives along the bay, slow mornings after Saturday nights downtown. Its disappearance left a gap that streaming cannot fill, because what listeners miss is not access to the songs but the sense that someone in their city is choosing them with care.
That is also why the revival has drawn the response it has. The announcement returns a piece of the city’s weekend architecture to its place, and it does so through the people closest to the original: the station that carried it, the friend who understands the music, and the downtown venue that can seat the audience inside the broadcast. Programs like this survive on exactly that triangle of loyalty — station, host, audience — and all three sides are intact.
The Weeks Ahead
The September 6 debut starts the new chapter, and the station will be watching the response with the kind of attention reserved for heritage programs. The immediate essentials are set: the time slot, the venue, the host and the tradition’s four-hour Sunday shape. Beyond that, the show’s future will follow the same path the original did — one Sunday at a time, built on word of mouth, brunch reservations and listeners who keep the dial where it has been for most of their lives.
The show’s return also lands at a moment when live, locally hosted radio has become rare enough to be a competitive distinction. National automation can stream jazz into any market, but it cannot broadcast from a room where the host knows the band on stage, the restaurant’s kitchen and the listeners calling in by name. The revived Jazz Brunch is 92 ZEW’s statement that some of its programming will remain unmistakably of Mobile — and it gives advertisers and community partners a flagship to gather around as the holiday weekend closes out the summer.
For now, the note to Mobile’s listeners is simple. The Sunday Jazz Brunch is back on 92 ZEW, Labor Day weekend, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., live from Penton’s Bistro on Conti Street. Catt Sirten’s voice is not coming back, and no one pretends otherwise. But the music he spent forty years putting on the air will be — played by a friend who learned the tradition from him, in the city that listened to it every Sunday for decades. That is more than most radio traditions get. Mobile, it turns out, is getting its Sunday mornings back.