Jazz on BBC TV 1960-1969

By BCMCR Alumni on April 1st, 2017

This award was granted to Dr Nicolas Pillai to provide research leadership to the field of jazz and television studies. Most notably, the research generated Jazz 625 Live: For One Night Only (broadcast BBC4, 3 May 2019) and Jazz 625 Live (BBC Radio 2, 5 May 2019), programmes for which Pillai acted as research consultant, script contributor and interviewee. In February 2020, the BBC4 programme was awarded Best Music Programme at the Broadcast Awards.

Other important outputs include: Jazz 1080, a recreation of a 1960s jazz TV shoot, recorded and vision-mixed live in front of an audience at BCU; a Jazz Research Journal special issue dedicated to stimulating the field; an oral history archive of 1960s BBC production crew, musicians and audience; a database of 1960s BBC jazz programming; a comic strip depicting the first week of Jazz 625; a report exploring historical reconstruction as a methodology; two conferences.

The project ran from 1 April 2017 to 15 November 2019. Find out more here: https://jazzontelly.org

Photos by Ian Davies.