Professor Unwin’s Jazz Lecture

For the first of this year’s Christmas posts I’m taking you back over six decades to Boxing Day 1959. On the BBC Light Programme that evening, between Ken Sykora’s Guitar Club and Radio Newsreel was the regular Saturday evening show Just Jazz with Steve Race. For this holiday edition Steve’s guest was Professor Stanley Unwin, ‘Professor of Jazz Studies at Brewflade University’. Deep joy.

An article in that week’s Radio Times told us what we could expect:

We have often wondered from what university Stanley Unwin got his title of Professor – we have learnt to be cautious from past experience with such other luminaries as Jimmy Edwards. The answer, it seems, is Brewflade University, where he holds the Chair of Jazz Studies. Well, well. Anyway, you can hear his Inaugural Lecture on this subject in today’s Just Jazz (Light), which will be introduced as usual by Steve Race. 

Professor Unwin has apparently undertaken to supply a critical commentary to the discs that Steve will put on the turn-table. The result will be some surprising new insights into jazz.  

By a stroke of luck a recording of that show has survived, or at least part of it has, and was recovered in New Zealand by Duncan Lockhart, to whom I pass on my thanks for forwarding it on.  

Just Jazz was broadcast on Saturday evenings on the Light from Saturday 5 October 1957 to 15 July 1961. The regular presenters were Steve Race, Charles Melville, Sim Copans and Frank Dixon.