As we inch our way towards winter, as the days get shorter, the nights colder, and the trees barer, everything seems to slow down. Aside from bursts of commercial activity around the swells of holiday rush, people generally spend more time indoors, watching the leaves change and the first snowfall cascade, scored to ambient clicks and clangs of a radiator. As we begin to huddle up and hunker down for our long, collective hibernation, finding the perfect station to curl up with becomes critical. And few genres match the contemplative, tranquil winter pulse better than the complex and multi-layered universe of jazz. Whether it's that dash of mellifluous Miles to bring a James Baldwin novel to life, a Brubeck ballad to make that cup of cocoa that much warmer, or a spicy Samba to swoon you off to a more tropical locale, jazz radio has the chameleon-like capability to always seem just right for any variation of wintertime wistfulness or mid-blizzard musings. With that in mind, we've put together a run down of the top five jazz stations to help you get through this winter, all available in the SHOUTcast Radio Directory. To listen to these stations and more, groove your way over to the Jazz genre.
Top 5 Wintertime Jazz Stations
5) Jazzradio.com
Serious jazz cats, look no further. Jazzradio.com has just about every stocking stuffer of a station that would delight even the most serious of aficionados. With more than 17 stations spanning everything from classic, bebop and Latin, to cool jazz, fusion and avant garde, jazzradio.com is that rare type of website that you don't feel guilty about killing hours and hours of time with.
RadioCrazy, a Swiss-German language station that began in Berlin before moving to Switzerland, plays a wide variety of modern and classic jazz and swing. So although you can find pretty much any branch of the jazz family tree here, you might wanna pay particular interest to their jazz/swing stream. If you're in a reminiscent mood, just give it a listen, and you'll find all the old standards as well as the more obscure deep cuts-all delivered in that timeless, grainy-gramophone sound quality that's so intrinsically linked to those golden jazz ages of yesteryear.
While we're trudging through the doldrums of winter, all the beautiful, bronzed people of Brazil are swaying, singing, and soccer-playing their way through their own sunny summer. Discouraging? Sure. Unfair? They're Brazilian. That's unfair by default. But with SKY.fm's Bossa channel, you can jam to Jobim or glissando your way around your living room to Gilberto Gil or a host of other balmy bossa ballads you can find on the station. You may never be able to quite dance like one, but for one cold evening, you can at least pretend to be a bona fide Brazilian.
This station, like the great state of California where it's based, is where you might wanna go to escape, rather than embrace winter. With an eclectic mix of standard and more experimental jazz formats that span both oceans and stylistic spectrums, SmoothJazz.com can give you a touch of every other season, and a glimpse of every other continent-an oft welcomed change from the monochromatic and fluorescent panorama of your freshly winterized apartment.
SKY.fm's smooth jazz affiliate, based out of New York, is sort of like the East Coast Boston Celtics to the SmoothJazz.com's Showtime LA Lakers. Biggie Smalls to 2Pac. Woody Allen to Steven Spielberg. You get the idea. Whereas its Cali counterpart wants to transport you somewhere else, and away from cold reality as presently constituted, SKY.fm seems to acknowledge the fact that you're gonna be inside for a while, and, hey man, that's cool. Just snuggle up and chill. A distinctly contemporary, sweepingly romantic touch makes this the perfect station for a cold night in with a significant other-or a cold night in with a book about someone else who actually has a significant other (*...sigh...*)
