New Orleans is where jazz was born, and it remains the city where jazz is most deeply embedded in daily life — not as museum culture but as the soundtrack of second lines, Mardi Gras parades, funerals, weddings, and the Sunday music that spills out of bars on Frenchmen Street every night of the year. The city's jazz tradition encompasses the earliest New Orleans jazz of Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver, the brass band tradition that generates the second line parade culture, the bebop and hard bop that followed the swing era, and the contemporary post-modern jazz of the Marsalis family and the musicians who have emerged from Ellis Marsalis's teaching legacy. New Orleans jazz radio captures all of it — the traditional, the contemporary, the hybrid genres that jazz produced when it mixed with blues, gospel, funk, and the Caribbean rhythms that were always present in the city's port culture. These eight stations represent the full richness of what New Orleans jazz radio has to offer.
WWOZ — The World Standard for New Orleans Jazz
WWOZ 90.7 FM — New Orleans, LA
WWOZ 90.7 FM is the most important radio station in New Orleans and one of the most important jazz and roots music stations in the world — a community-supported non-profit that has been broadcasting the city's musical heritage since 1980. WWOZ programs jazz, blues, gospel, R&B, funk, and the New Orleans brass band tradition with the depth and authenticity that only a station fully embedded in the city's music culture can achieve. Its volunteer DJs are musicians, scholars, and lifelong listeners whose knowledge of the catalog goes deep into the rare and the obscure. The station's live coverage of Jazz Fest, Mardi Gras, and the city's parade culture brings New Orleans's street music to listeners worldwide. If you listen to only one New Orleans radio station, it should be WWOZ. The station's tag line — "guardians of the groove" — understates its significance: WWOZ is not just a guardian of New Orleans music, it is part of the tradition it broadcasts.
New Orleans Jazz and R&B
Smooth Jazz NOLA — New Orleans, LA
Smooth Jazz NOLA programs the contemporary jazz and smooth jazz format with a New Orleans sensibility — the kind of music that fills the upscale restaurants of the French Quarter and the hotel lounges of Canal Street, jazz that is accessible and sophisticated without sacrificing musicianship. New Orleans has a particular relationship to smooth jazz because the city's tradition of sophisticated Black entertainment culture — the Creole musical culture that produced so much of what became jazz in the first place — has always included a more polished, drawing-room version of the music alongside the street music of the brass bands. Smooth Jazz NOLA represents that tradition: jazz as elegant urban soundtrack, connected to the city's long history of presenting Black musical excellence to mixed audiences in the city's clubs and theaters.
Bayou 95.7 — New Orleans, LA
Bayou 95.7 programs the soul, R&B, and classic hits format that has deep roots in New Orleans's musical identity. The city produced some of the most important rhythm and blues recordings of the 1950s and 1960s — Fats Domino, Little Richard, Professor Longhair, the Meters, Allen Toussaint — and that New Orleans R&B tradition is so distinctive in its rolling piano style, its second-line rhythms, and its parade culture influences that it constitutes its own genre category. Bayou 95.7 programs within this tradition, giving New Orleans R&B listeners a format that acknowledges the city's specific contribution to soul and rhythm and blues rather than treating it as interchangeable with the Memphis or Detroit R&B traditions. For listeners who want to understand the New Orleans groove that influenced rock and roll as profoundly as Chicago blues or Motown soul, Bayou 95.7 provides essential listening.
New Orleans College and Community Radio
WTUL 91.5 FM — New Orleans, LA
WTUL 91.5 FM is Tulane University's student-run radio station, programming the eclectic format that characterizes the best college radio — and in New Orleans, college radio has the advantage of operating in a city where every genre of American music has deep local roots. WTUL programs jazz alongside indie rock, experimental music, and the contemporary genres that Tulane students bring to the city from across the country, creating a radio mix that reflects both the city's traditions and the new influences that arrive with each college generation. The station's jazz programming benefits from proximity to the New Orleans scene; student DJs can walk down to Frenchmen Street to hear the music they broadcast on the radio, giving WTUL's jazz programming an experiential depth that radio in other cities cannot match. For listeners who want New Orleans jazz in a contemporary context, alongside music that reflects what young New Orleanians are listening to now, WTUL provides the perspective.
Front Porch Jamz — New Orleans, LA
Front Porch Jamz programs the roots, Americana, and acoustic music that connects New Orleans's jazz and blues heritage to the broader American folk music tradition. New Orleans's cultural position at the mouth of the Mississippi — the city where the river's entire musical ecosystem arrives at the Gulf — means that its music has always been a hybrid: the African rhythms of Congo Square, the French and Spanish Creole traditions, the Appalachian music that came down the river with migrants, and the Caribbean sounds that arrived by sea. Front Porch Jamz programs the acoustic tradition that sits at the intersection of all these influences, providing a more intimate and less amplified version of the New Orleans sound that suits certain listening contexts better than the full electric treatment. For listeners who want the folk and acoustic side of the same tradition that produced jazz and blues, Front Porch Jamz provides the quieter branch.
New Orleans News and Public Radio
WWNO 89.9 FM — New Orleans, LA
WWNO 89.9 FM is New Orleans's NPR affiliate, providing the news journalism and public affairs programming that places the city's music culture in its broader social and political context. WWNO's coverage of New Orleans includes the arts and music journalism that a city of this cultural significance demands — reporting on Jazz Fest, coverage of the local music scene, the cultural history of a city that has rebuilt itself repeatedly from hurricanes and floods while maintaining its musical identity. For listeners who want to understand New Orleans's music not just as entertainment but as a cultural force connected to the city's history of race, immigration, poverty, and resilience, WWNO provides the context that music radio alone cannot. The station's programming spans the full range of public radio content while maintaining a distinctly New Orleans voice in its local coverage.
Mardi Gras Radio — New Orleans, LA
Mardi Gras Radio programs the festive, celebratory side of New Orleans music — the parade music, the brass band recordings, the second line anthems, and the general atmosphere of a city that has elevated celebration to an art form. Mardi Gras is not just a holiday in New Orleans but the organizing principle of a musical culture that uses parade and celebration as its primary form of expression. The brass band tradition — with its tubas, sousaphones, snare drums, and raucous horns — is one of the most direct descendants of the original New Orleans jazz of the early 20th century, and Mardi Gras Radio programs it with the energy that the format demands. For listeners who want the most kinetic, physically immediate version of New Orleans jazz — the music that makes you move — Mardi Gras Radio captures the essential pulse of the city's street culture.
WWL 870 AM — New Orleans, LA
WWL 870 AM is New Orleans's historic news, talk, and sports radio station — one of the oldest and most powerful AM signals in the South, with a signal that reaches across the Gulf South. WWL is the voice of New Orleans in moments of crisis and celebration: its coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, broadcasting continuously when the city was underwater, is one of the defining moments of American radio journalism. The station covers Saints football, New Orleans politics, and Gulf South culture with the depth that comes from decades of institutional presence. For listeners who want to understand New Orleans beyond its music — the city's politics, its resilience, its complex relationship with the Gulf Coast environment — WWL provides the essential information radio alongside which the music radio makes its fullest sense.
For more New Orleans and Louisiana radio content, see our posts on New Orleans radio stations, jazz radio online, and blues radio online.
