Jez Nelson: My Jazz FM

'It was a Sunday afternoon in 1989 and I’d been out to lunch. When I got home the light on my answerphone (remember them) was flashing. I pressed play and the tape ran. “Hey man, it’s Dave Lee. I ing dig your demo tape man. It’s so ing hip. I want you on the station!” It was a message that would change my life forever. Dave Lee was the maverick music man behind the launch of Jazz FM. Pianist, composer (he wrote ‘What’s up Pussycat”) and a proper jazz cat in a hat (a trilby) Dave was the Jazz that won the Jazz FM license. He loved people with an edge and that’s exactly what these “Pirate Boys” Phillips and Nelson gave him. If it wasn’t for Dave I wouldn’t have got the gig and I wouldn’t be back at Jazz FM 30 years later having spent the best years of my adult life behind the microphone presenting the music I adore.

1990.and 1991 were unquestionably two of the best years of my life. Amazingly for 4 hours a night, 4 days a week I was given total freedom to play what I wanted. That meant Coltrane, Courtney Pine, Nina Simone, Gil Scott-Heron, Sun Ra, A Tribe Called Quest and Stevie Wonder in a single hour. Luckily, I was tucked away at night when the bosses were asleep, so I got away with murder. It’s where I still like to be! In those first 18 months of the station’s life, I got to meet and hang with loads of my jazz heroes and made some great friends some, like George Reid and PY (Peter Young), sadly no longer with us. Chris and I came up with the programme name Somethin’ Else after rifling through the Blue Note section of the Jazz FM library about an hour before our first programme together. It subsequently became the name of the production company I run as well as, once again, my Jazz FM show.

Being back on Jazz FM again late at night on a Sunday is like coming home. To be honest I still feel like a kid in a jazz candy store and when Chris Phillips and I are together we still talk about music in the same way we did when we were twenty-year-olds wearing berets and broadcasting pirate radio from secret locations. Luckily the music is as good as ever. Long live Jazz FM!'

Listen to Jez reflect on his 30 years with the station here: