The Jazz GrooveThe Jazz Groove

The Jazz Groove belongs to a charity with a stated grievance: the Foundation to Advance Jazz, a San Francisco non-profit set up to preserve and strengthen what it calls America's greatest contribution to the arts, mainly by recruiting listeners who do not yet care about it. The service it runs carries no advertising and takes no commercial money at all, and it has grown into five stations — three of laid-back jazz, one of vocal standards, one of smooth jazz. Mix #1 is the flagship of the set.

Every hour on it is assembled by hand. Professional musicologists work through a library of more than ten thousand recordings and blend them into a continuous instrumental set, so early jazz, big-band swing and Gypsy guitar turn up in the same stretch as bebop, hard bop and the post-bop of the eighties and nineties. Nothing is announced and nothing is sung.