By Chris Stilwell
It's a challenge, isn't it? If you're home, you probably have one or two stations you can rely on, but the real adventure is when you visit another town and start scanning the dial. Where, oh where, is the Jazz Radio?
You'll run the dial, getting sucked into one of those "Smooth Jazz" stations for a minute, only to spew out the strained tapicoca sounds that dribble forth in that fabled "Golden Ten Seconds" the Radio Pros figure you will listen & decide to Stick or Click..
And you decide to Click, until, somehow, you manage to find something that works. When you do, (If you do..), it's probably a non-commercial station, and probably NPR (National Public Radio). It's good we have NPR, because the level of jazz programming is distinctly better than most commercially run jazz stations, (especially the latest trend in commercially sucessful jazz radio, the "Smooth Jazz" format). By it's very nature, Jazz can be complex music, which makes demands on the listener in terms of time signatures, melodic structure,
and artistic content. It is not appealing to the fat middle of the bell curve. Most of the time it doesn't even have words, which tell the listener a story they can "relate" to. In a genre where just one well-placed note can be the entire crux of a musical expression, things like words tend to get in the way. And the vast majority of people don't listen to music, or radio, with that kind of intensity. For the most part, radio is a kind of electonic lubricant which makes sliding through one's work-a-day world much more pleasant. People typically listen to radio in their cars during drive time, or at work. They want a sense of comfort, familiarity, & predictability, all things that jazz has been known to challenge.
Without the non-commercial havens of NPR, and the smaller clusters of stations such as Pacifica and the late KRAB Nebula, there would probably be fewer than a dozen real jazz stations out there. The financial problems of jazz stations are legendary, The non-commercial stations themselves are usually not 100% jazz stations either. They are more accurately "Variety Stations" or "Eclectic", (the latest buzz-word the Radio Pros have come up with to say the same thing). But nonetheless, some of the best jazz shows & most reliable jazz radio are provided by these sources.
It would be wonderful if there were lots of good jazz stations out there, but the fact is, there just aren't that many. Since part of the adventure of Radio is in the exploring, it might make it a little more exciting and fun to be looking for something rare, a radio gem hidden in a vast, Mundane Wilderness of safe, predictable, pre-selected & packaged professionalism, which has been the death of the true Spirit Of Jazz from the very beginning. NPR and the non-commercial stations remain a bastion of integrity in a business which seems to transform everything it touches into Pablum. Without these conerstones of jazz radio, it's doubtful the musicians themselves would be known by more than a few thousand hard core fans, as compared with the millions of listeners that are reached because of non-commmercial radio. And that would make for a very sad state of this art we love.
