On Not Being a Jazzer

In April this year, the death was announced of the veteran Radio 3 jazz presenter Geoffrey Smith – who hosted Jazz Record Requests for over twenty years. To mark Geoffrey’s death, this week there’s another chance to hear a series of Essays from 2020 in which Geoff, as an American, explored his observations of the British relationship with Jazz.

In this first programme, Geoffrey questions the British term ‘jazzer’ and its jokey connotations, which are in sharp contrast to the genre’s more serious Stateside identity as American classical music. There, the genealogy and pedigree of the genre is more complex, going back to the rich musical mix of New Orleans. As John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet once said, "We didn't have Bach, Beethoven or Mozart, so we needed to create a music that could do all the things that music can do". But to the British, argues Geoffrey, the essential value of jazz is precisely that it isn't classical. Geoffrey reminds us that the two genres overlap in key expressive features, and that the immortal names in their respective pantheons have much in common.