Radio Swiss JazzRadio Swiss Jazz

Radio Swiss Jazz is a music service of SRG SSR, the Swiss public broadcaster, and it is assembled the way a library is rather than the way a radio show is: a small team of music editors, working out of SRF's Studio Basel, maintains a repertoire of some eight thousand titles and sequences it without advertising, presenters or chatter of any kind. Half of what goes out, on average, has a Swiss connection, which is a remarkable quota for a station whose core repertoire was written in America.

The core is the Great American Songbook, swung, with bebop instrumentals either side of it and Latin and world records rounding out the hours. Two strands are fixed: Jazz Made in Switzerland gives the country's own players a three-hour block of the schedule every day, and Jazz for Dinner takes the classic end of the catalogue right through each evening.