"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the Preservation of Fire.” - Gustav Mahler
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about Jazz After Hours
Jazz After Hours is the longest continuously running, nationally syndicated jazz program on the radio. In 2014, broadcaster and digital media artist Jeff Hanley began hosting the program, following an award winning 30 year run by the show’s creator, Jim Wilke. The four hour show celebrates and nurtures the constantly evolving music that is jazz. The music doesn’t sit still and neither does Jazz After Hours. Check out our Stations listing to find the program on your local public radio station or listen online with our on-demand streaming player. Read more >>
11th Annual Coltrane Festival returns to Smoke Jazz
End the jazz year and celebrate the new with NYC's top shelf musicians in one of its premiere clubs.
Located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side near the corner of Broadway and 106th Street (aka Duke Ellington Boulevard), Smoke Jazz Club is one of New York City’s premiere live music venues. Renowned for offering top-notch programming of accessible, timeless jazz featuring legendary performers, modern masters and rising stars, Smoke stands apart with its candlelit dining room, stellar acoustics, and classic American cuisine.
Founded in 1999, SMOKE also boasts a GRAMMY-nominated record label, Smoke Sessions Records, and a celebrated streaming concert series, Smoke Screens. For more info visit SMOKEjazz.com.
Ticketing + Information: When: Tuesday-Sunday @ 7:00 p.m. + 9:00 p.m. and additional 10:30 p.m. (Fri & Sat only). Doors open at 5:00 p.m. (unless otherwise noted)
Where: Smoke Jazz Club, 2751 Broadway (between 105/106th Streets), New York, NY, Train: 1 to 103rd Street.
Tickets: In-Person $25-$60. Livestream $15. For more information and to make reservations, please visit SMOKEjazz.com.
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Listen to this month's Jazz After Hours
Want to go deeper? Looking for a past show you really liked? Maybe you want to binge listen to Jazz After Hours. Check out our archive. Every show in 2023 now available to stream!
emerging artists and jazz greats
Your music on Jazz After Hours
Are you a jazz musician with a new record you want the world to hear? Jazz After Hours accepts submissions of new jazz for airplay. No record promoter is required to have your music considered. The only requirements: quality, musicianship and originality. Our mission is to support and encourage the creation of fresh new jazz. Your new music could be broadcast and streamed worldwide on the PRX network.
We do not accept physical copies. In the interest of everyone’s health, your budget, and the environment, only digital submissions are accepted. We accept studio quality recordings, in .wav, .mp3, .mp4, or .aiff file formats, delivered by download. Files must be properly named and accompanied by a one-sheet of information about you and your music.
Questions? Contact us through the contact form at the bottom of this page.
We look forward to hearing your new music.
Jazz After Hours Featured Video
Cry Me A River - new from Hilario Duran Latin Jazz Big Band
The celebrated Cuban-Canadian composer and piano-master Hilario Durán leads his nineteen-piece ensemble featuring special guests Paquito D’Rivera and Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez in a stellar big band recording – the first in 17 years. Hilario Durán brings the full scope of his artistry, the depth of knowledge of musical genres in the perfect storm of big artistry on Cry Me A River. The nine works on this recording are born of Durán’s Afro-Caribbean cultural topography but are also informed by his gifts for bending tradition and infusing his arrangements with unfettered improvisation. Through the course of the album the Grammy-nominated and Juno Award-winning Durán actively throws overboard melodic, harmonic, and structural hooks that have become expressively blunted through overuse, building big band charts that bloom in color and texture and atmospheric beauty.
Programming philosophy
Jazz is yours to discover
With great affection and all due respect to its storied history and rich tradition, we think jazz music was never meant to be bronzed and put on a shelf. Captured, remembered, studied, even lionized, but not frozen in time. Jazz didn’t stop being great in 1947 or 1955 or 1968 or 1976. It’s pretty great in 2023.
Name a name, anyone in the pantheon of jazz greats. To a person, they once were young, feisty, likely impertinent. They sought to break the mold; dared to make mistakes; challenged the elders and the music that came before. That’s what jazz musicians do.
Each of those jazz musician once had their first gig. Their first recording session. Their first breakthrough moment and their first bad review. And believe it or not, there was a joyful moment when someone played their music on the radio for the first time. For some hard-working musician, that happens almost every week on Jazz After Hours.
The point being … jazz ain’t over.
Record stores come and record stores go. Most of them are long gone. Radio stations do the same. Technology changes, and while it closes some doors it opens many others. The critics and whiners are going to beat their chests and find every possible way to make a buck with a tired story about the death of jazz. People who haven’t bought a jazz record in 40 years are going to try to convince you that was the last great jazz. It wasn’t. Jazz is alive and very entertaining in 2023. We invite you to listen to what we play on Jazz After Hours and judge for yourself.
These are the musicians you’ll be talking about for the next 20 or 30 years. They’re playing music today that is the future of jazz. It’s new, it’s fresh and it’s damn good. Don’t take our word for it. Listen each week on public radio. This is your discovery process.
Comment? Question? Programming suggestion?
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