Jazz stations fall into two camps that barely acknowledge each other. One is smooth and contemporary jazz, a format built for background listening with a steady tempo, a clean mix and no difficult passages. The other is jazz as a repertoire, covering swing, bebop, hard bop, modal and post-war small-group recordings on their own terms, programmed by people who care which session a track came from.
Both are represented here and they serve opposite purposes. The first is for working; the second is for listening. Neither is a worse station, but pressing play on the wrong one is a reliable way to be annoyed.
Jazz punishes low bitrates more than any other genre. Brushed drums are essentially filtered noise, upright bass lives in the frequencies encoders sacrifice first, and a ride cymbal is the single hardest thing to encode cheaply. A jazz stream at 96 kbps sounds like it is playing in the next room. The stations in this directory running 192 or 256 kbps are worth the extra data specifically for this genre, and the difference is obvious within about ten seconds on any half-decent pair of headphones.
One more practical note: jazz stations are among the most likely here to run named DJ shows rather than automated rotation, which means the same station sounds genuinely different at different hours. If a jazz stream disappoints you at two in the afternoon, it is worth trying again in the evening.
