The Jazz Services report on Jazz in the media says coverage is “inadequate.” In the BBC’s case that ain’t the problem. It’s those silos, those empires, telling arses from elbows.
-Several people have been telling me how good Kenneth Clarke’s lunchtime series is.
-Others have been raving about a BBC 4 documentary last Friday on the significance of 1959 in jazz.
-There are good radio programmes from Scotland and Northern Ireland available on line.
-I caught an old Omnibus show from 1977 last night on BBC4 where Andre Previn was interviewing the wonderful Oscar Peterson when he was still in good health and playing like 2-3 pianists.
–Alyn Shipton talked to me a couple of weeks ago while walking his dog about the programmes he has coming up on his radio show….
-There’s all sorts of programmes on Radio 2
It’s all coming through parallel chanels. Nowhere, NOWHERE is it collated for the viewer/listener. User-friendly? It’s Balkanization, and it’s user-hostile!
Jazz Services keeps a good page on the radio output, but it hasn’t been updated eg for the change in broadcastr time for Jazz Line-Up.
I can suggest not one but two names to anyone who has the power to do anything. E-mail me.
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It’s been axed already.http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/jazz/
Thank you. I’m not surprised! With just five posts in its last seven <>months<>, can you say it was providing anyone with a service?
As an ex-BBC broadcaster, I think a blog would be an excellent idea, but I do feel that – in general – jazz is treated as a matter of peripheral interest and bright new initiatives are slow to appear. The BBC has always kept phenomenal statistics to prove that jazz music receives equal representation as other ‘lively arts’ and – to be fair – jazz (however much we love it!) is a minority interest. It probably needs an initiative from another source – akin to the deeply lamented ‘theJazz’ station – to source the same sort of cultural turnaround for our music as ‘Classic FM’ did for its own (once highly minority) genre. At present, it seems to me, we are continuing to bang our heads against the same media brick walls as we were twenty years ago; a sorry state of affairs when – as this excellent site so conclusively proves – there’s more going on in jazz music just now (including a flourishing youth-following) than there has ever been since the l950s.
Digby Fairweather.