Few radio stations can trace their identity back to a print publication older than most countries' current constitutions. Musica Jazz Radio does exactly that, streaming jazz and blues out of Milan as the broadcast companion to Musica Jazz, a magazine that has covered Italian and international jazz continuously since 1945.
Musica Jazz was founded by journalist Gian Carlo Testoni, with its first issue appearing in 1945, making it Italy's first dedicated jazz publication and, by the magazine's own account, the second-longest-running jazz magazine in the world. Testoni directed it until 1965, when critic Arrigo Polillo took over, steering the magazine through decades in which Italy built one of Europe's most serious jazz cultures, from postwar clubs to the festival circuit that eventually made cities like Milan and Umbria fixtures on the European jazz calendar. Publisher Rusconi Editore acquired the title in November 1981, the same year it began bundling each issue with a CD, a format it still uses today under current publisher 22Publishing. In 2015, Milan's mayor awarded the magazine the Ambrogino d'oro, the city's own honor for people and institutions who have shaped its cultural life.
Musica Jazz Radio extends that eight-decade archive into a live stream, mixing jazz standards with blues, the genre most directly tied to jazz's own harmonic roots. For a magazine built on documenting and reviewing the genre in print, a radio station is a natural next step: where the pages analyze a record, the stream lets you simply hear what that record, or a thousand others like it, actually sounds like.
Milan's own jazz scene gives the station plenty of local material to draw from too, a city with a deep tradition of jazz clubs and conservatories that has produced and hosted musicians across nearly every era the magazine itself has covered.
Musica Jazz Radio streams free on Radio Shuffle for anyone who wants to hear the sound behind eight decades of Italian jazz criticism.