Fans could hardly believe they were listening to the likes of jazz great Herbie Hancock on theJazz. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
Here's a famous jazz gag: a musician invited to attend a photoshoot at 10 o'clock in the morning observed that he hadn't previously known there were two 10 o'clocks in one day.
But if that kind of hour doesn't exactly suit the practitioners of this elusive art, it might not be a bad time for putting out feelers toward a so far unconverted listening public - and this Friday morning at nine, that's exactly what those music-loving entrepreneurs at Classic FM are setting out to do with phase two of their new digital radio station, theJazz.
Almost unannounced (word-of-mouth was the creators' shrewdly assessed marketing preference), theJazz got going last Christmas, as an automated playlist operation putting out classic material across the history of the music. The word soon spread. Fans could hardly believe they were really hearing Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, David Sanborn, Diana Krall, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk and dozens more, all back-to-back on the British airwaves - traditionally a graveyard for jazz awareness, with a few honourable exceptions. The groundwork done, theJazz is now moving up a gear with a raft of famous presenters, including musicians Jamie Cullum, Courtney Pine and Jacqui Dankworth entering the schedules from this weekend.
The former BBC jazz broadcaster Helen Mayhew is the first of theJazz's new faces to take to the microphone tomorrow, and it's a promising start - Mayhew is a knowledgeable, broadminded and engaging operator with a track record that includes a remarkable rearguard action to keep proper jazz alive on the fast-declining JazzFM station during its terminal crises in the 1990s. But that JazzFM history (the station is now transformed into Smooth FM, owned by the Guardian Media Group, and the title says it all) is a stark reminder of the challenge theJazz faces.
Its predecessor Jazz FM was launched to massive ballyhoo in 1990 - an Albert Hall concert featuring the late Ella Fitzgerald, no less - but by 1992 it was in such humiliating public decline that it even fired one of its last jazz-oriented DJs, Steve Edwards, on air. Over-optimism and shortfalls in advertising drove the well-intentioned enterprise into the hands of salvage operators who didn't care about its jazz agenda and decimated it. Created as a sister venture to an already very successful music station in Classic FM, theJazz is designed to evolve along the same lines as its classical partner, so it's starting from a very different place.
It would be churlish to do anything other than wish theJazz the best of luck. But though the station will have to sink or swim as a business, it carries the hopes of more jazz-lovers than the ones who simply want to hear where jazz has been. Classic FM plays classical music's greatest hits, and theJazz will inevitably rely on the same policy to keep the bank happy. But jazz is a living, breathing and enduringly vibrant contemporary art - while many current manifestations of it are very accessible, not all of it boils down to great themes you can hum in the bath. It's to be hoped that the planners at theJazz will bend an ear toward all the fascinating things jazz still is, and can be. Not only will that fulfil their responsibilities in the widest sense, it will bring them a wider spread of committed listeners, too.
