ABSTRACT
Using five moments in jazz history, this chapter reveals the distinctive role that radio took in husbanding jazz in the twentieth century, from the 1920s, when radio gains its institutional form and jazz appears as a cultural phenomenon, to the Second World War when jazz is seen as a “problematic music.” In the postwar period, radio attempts to serve trads and moderns as jazz faces an identity crisis and then highlights its national forms as jazz becomes a diverse, global cultural form. Finally, the chapter examines the way in which radio reimagines the music as a radio format: smooth jazz.
