OTRR This Is Jazz Singles


(4.5 stars; 2 reviews)

THIS IS JAZZ Premiering on January 18, 1947, host Rudi Blesh’s This Is Jazz aired until October 4 of the same year. Blesh was a jazz historian, commentator, and promoter with a special interest in earlier jazz tunes and performers. His first book, Shining Trumpets , was published in 1946, a year before his radio series. This Is Jazz originated from New York’s WOR and was broadcast over the Mutual network as an unsponsored program. The series’ 35 episodes were later released by the Jazzology record label. This is the Single Episodes Page. The Maintained Set includes extras not found here. It is located here . This Single Episodes page is provided in case you want to sample the shows. Note that in many cases, file names have been modified from the original OTRR names to conform to archive.org naming requirements.

This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.

Reviews

You can learn a great deal about Jazz from this show


(5 stars)

Sounds almost like a College Class in Jazz History for an audience... Rudi Blesh is a recognized writer and historian in the field, and his treatment is thoroughly "about the facts..." and shows his love of the great American musical form. Lotta good music here, and seems like it's an early BBS/PBS idea, IMHO. See the book that followed for similar history, at Rudi's link https://archive.org/search?query=blesh%2C+rudi As for the Jubilee comment, it was much more a show of entertainment with the stars themselves, so makes for more hip live music by the greats, and patter along the way. There are two versions on Internet Archive, which seem, from the glitch in the first episode, to be from the same classic source. Here's one link. This one has more of a history of the show. https://archive.org/details/jubilee_202008/421009_001_Duke_Ellington_Ethel_Waters.mp3

Not quite as good as Jubilee but...


(4 stars)

there are a few 'name' jazz heroes here, including; Per RadioGoldIndex: Sidney Bechet featured on eps 3/1/47 3/24/47 4/19 5/24 7/12 8/02 10/04 Kid Ory: 8/09/47 Leadbelly 6/14/47 Canada Lee (Cry The Beloved Country, Lifeboat) 5/31/47 Episode 12 - April 26, 1947 Louis Armstrong and band - When The Saints... Bertha Chippie Hill https://archive.org/details/georgeblood?query=Bertha+Hill 7/5/47 7/19/47 7/26/47 8/30/47