BBC Radio 3’s withdrawal from its Awards for World Music merits coverage on the editorials page of today’s Guardian,no less.

A post by Peter Bacon, adoptive Brummie from South Africa….in his thejazzbreakfast blogthis morning, serendipitously speaks my mind, writing about Lionel Loueke (Benin via Berklee Jazz School in Boston):

“Jazz was “world music” long before that label was invented as a marketing tool in the 1980, but it still finds new and exciting developments.”

And the great Parisian Manhattanite Mike Zwerin was making the same point about the breadth of jazz on Bloomberg in 2006. Mike’s writing, is never a repeated mind-numbing vamp . It’s improvised, fresh and full of life.

“Jazz is becoming a true world music, a common denominator, a sort of Esperanto. Everybody can play the blues. By now jazz is taught in conservatories in such cities as Porto, Helsinki, Paris, Tel Aviv, Hanoi and Trondheim. “