This chapter argues that television history has been neglected by jazz scholars. It describes a historical relationship between the music and the broadcast medium, noting particular trends such as musicians in variety and other performance settings, reenactments of key moments in jazz history, narratives of jazz in episodic drama and comedic treatments of jazz. While there is a growing literature on variety/performance programming, the chapter notes the ongoing absence of scholarship on dramatic and comedic treatments. Drawing on methodologies from television studies, case studies are presented which demonstrate rich engagements between jazz and television. The chapter ends by suggesting that we should turn away from considering exceptional moments in jazz television history and towards its presence in the everyday consumption of television.

The use of the present tense to refer to past events may depend on two conceptual scenarios. First, the speaker may be mentally displaced to the past. Second, the speaker may pretend that the past events are currently accessible in the form of a representation. This 'representation' scenario is generally the most economic conceptual explanation for the use of the present tense to refer past events. Examples are discussed to illustrate the argument: passages from the novels of Alexandre Dumas and from Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's schooldays; narratives accompanying security camera footage; a narrative by a character in an episode of Seinfeld; and passages from Thucydides. In all these cases the use of the present tense to refer to past events can be made sense of in terms of a conceptual representation scenario, where the difference lies in the exact nature of the representation. The more concrete the representation, the stronger the tendency for the speaker to use the present tense to designate the described events.