Once a lively presence on radio, jazz now finds itself relegated to satellite broadcasters and low-watt stations at the edge of the dial. Aaron J. Johnson examines jazz radio from the advent of Black radio in 1948 to its near extinction from the commercial dial after 1980. Even in jazz's heyday, programmers and DJs excluded many styles and artists, and Johnson delves into how the politics of decision-making and the political uses of the medium shaped jazz radio formats. Johnson shows radio's role in the contradictory perceptions of jazz as American's model artistic contribution to the world, as Black classical music, and as the soundtrack of African American rebellion and resistance for much of the twentieth century.

An interwoven story of a music and a medium, Jazz Radio America answers perennial questions about why certain kinds of jazz get played and why even that music is played in so few places.