Jazz Record Requests at 50

When I wrote on this blog about my excitement at taking over this programme from Geoffrey Smith two and a half years ago, I knew that it was coming up to its half century. This makes it, as far as I can tell, the longest running jazz radio programme anywhere in the world. Its actual 50th birthday is on 12 December, so we’re celebrating on the preceding Saturday, 6 December 2014.

I grew up listening to this programme. Saturday lunchtimes, and then teatimes after it moved from midday, meant it was time to tune to the Third Programme for the weekly installment of jazz, just as Sunday lunchtimes were usually the chance to retune to the Light Programme and listen to the Clitheroe Kid or the Navy Lark (though the latter was on one if its 6 monthly breaks when Jazz Record Requests began).

There was a decent collection of jazz records (mainly 78s) in the house when I was a boy, with the likes of Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines and Muggsy Spanier. But it was listening to Humphrey Lyttelton and later Steve Race and Peter Clayton on JRR that broadened my awareness far beyond those sounds, to include everything from Billie Holiday to Stan Kenton, and from Meade Lux Lewis to Bill Evans. Just as teenagers today discuss what’s shown up in terms of new music on YouTube, Soundcloud or other social media, my friends and I would meet on a Monday at school and talk about the music we’d discovered on JRR – often making the trek to the local record shop to sit in a booth and play more discs by the same artist. We even occasionally bought something we’d heard, and I still have the EPs, and some of the LPs I got with my pocket money by artists ranging from Sidney Bechet to Mick Mulligan.

What I have learned from the postcards, letters and emails that come in every week is that I was not alone There were listeners all over the county sharing this sense of discovery, and in the recent feature I have been running on the programme about how people first discovered jazz, many a listener has recalled it being through a track heard for the first time on JRR. I’m also pleased that many of the letters I get nowadays say, “I’ve been listening since the beginning, but this is my first ever request!” It’s great that more and more people are being drawn into sharing their experiences of jazz and of the programme.

But not all listeners have shared their last half century with Jazz Record Requests. Among those who write in, there are plenty of younger newcomers to the music, who either want to tell other fans about a fresh sound heard at a local club, or who want to know more about the great names of the past. So I’ve had letters from listeners as young as nine or ten asking for tracks by Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, but also plenty of twenty-somethings, who’ve just heard a club session by Phil Meadows, or Paul Edis, or Ivo Neame, or Cath Roberts — or indeed any of the dazzling array of younger musicians who are keeping jazz alive and reinventing the genre. (I certainly don’t fear for jazz’s future, with such a rich roster of new home-grown talent.)

Occasionally we’ll get the question “Where is the jazz we know and love?” If those letters come with a request included, more often than not I’ll manage to play it, but for those who don’t request, I normally drop them a line and politely remind them that the programme really does belong to its listeners. If they’d care to request what they think is missing, I’ll attempt to include it. But I can’t if nobody asks for it!

For the fiftieth birthday edition, I’ve had great fun (with the help of Paul Wilson, the curator of Radio at the National Sound Archive at the British Library) listening to many old episodes of the programme. Because JRR usually went out live in the old days, it was seldom recorded. But fortunately the BL has copies recorded off air by enthusiasts and collectors, notably the late Carlo Krahmer, drummer and founder of the Esquire record label. Thanks to Carlo and others like him, on this special anniversary programme, we can once again hear the voices of all my predecessors (including Geoffrey Smith, who popped into the JRR studio to read a current request). It’s great to celebrate what has always been an entirely audience-driven programme with memories of the past that have been preserved by that very audience itself.