Jazz Radio Afro JazzJazz Radio Afro Jazz

Jazz Radio started out as Frequence Jazz, which Christophe Mahe put on 97.3 in Lyon on 10 January 1996 — the first French station to play jazz around the clock rather than in an evening slot, at a moment when nobody was sure there was an audience for it. A Paris edition followed that August with its own programming, the network took the name Jazz Radio in June 2008, and it grew from there into an FM network reaching across France and Monaco, owned throughout by Mahe's Espace Group.

Dozens of themed webradios sit behind the main signal, split so finely that one plays nothing but Ibrahim Maalouf and another nothing but Beatles songs rearranged as jazz; New York, Crooner, Lounge, Blues and Soul cover the more obvious ground. Afro Jazz is the one working the seam between jazz and West African music — horns against talking drums, and the long argument between them.