Nocturne

Nocturne, a listening guide

Smooth jazz, soul, lounge and chillout — eight stations, set out by the hour of the day.

Read the station for this hour Each band is a stretch of the day. The one you are in is marked.
Easy06–09Smooth jazz09–12Lounge12–15Crossover15–18Dinner18–20Jazz20–22Chillout22–00Classical00–06

At this hour: Pick an hour. The dial tells you what fits it.

What this is

Nocturne is a guide, not a station.

Eight pages, one for each kind of evening, each with five records that will get you into it and one argument you are free to lose. The addresses come from the radio that used to live here.

Sarah Vaughan

2004

CROOZE.fm went on air in Antwerp

104.2

its Antwerp frequency in MHz, before the FM years ran out

15 May 2024

the last broadcast

8

stream addresses, kept here as guides

Eight stations

Crossover15:00 – 18:00Jazz20:00 – 22:00Smooth jazz09:00 – 12:00Lounge12:00 – 15:00Chillout22:00 – 24:00Easy06:00 – 09:00Dinner18:00 – 20:00Classical00:00 – 06:00

eight pages, five records each · There is no player on this page. Nocturne writes about records; where you play them is your business.

The faces on the records

William Gottlieb photographed the New York clubs between 1938 and 1948 for Down Beat and the Washington Post. The Library of Congress holds the negatives; the pictures are in the public domain.

Billie Holiday, voice
Billie Holiday, 1947
Thelonious Monk, piano
Thelonious Monk, 1947
Sarah Vaughan, voice
Sarah Vaughan, 1946
Django Reinhardt, guitar
Django Reinhardt, 1946
Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet
Dizzy Gillespie, 1947
Billy Strayhorn, piano
Billy Strayhorn, 1946–48
Al Grey, trombone
Al Grey, undated
Duke Ellington, orchestra
Duke Ellington, undated

A letter from the editor

I bought this domain because I was annoyed. For twenty years crooze.fm was where you went when you wanted jazz without a presenter talking over the intro, and then one evening in May 2024 it stopped, and in February 2026 even the website gave up.

I can't put the station back. I don't own the name, I don't have the playlists, and the people who made it deserve better than someone else wearing their coat.

What I can do is keep the addresses pointing at something. Someone out there still has /streams/lounge/ in a bookmark bar from 2019. They should land on a page about lounge music, not on a parked domain with three ads on it.

So: eight pages, five records to a page, one opinion each. If you disagree with a page, that is the page working.

The editor

Nocturne, Antwerp

Questions

Is this CROOZE.fm?
No. CROOZE.fm was a Belgian station, founded in Antwerp in 2004 and owned for most of its life by Frank Leysen. It signed off on 15 May 2024. Nocturne is a different thing by different people on the same domain, and it has no connection to the station, its owners or its rights holders.
Can I listen here?
No. There is no stream and no player. This is writing about records — where you play them is your own affair, and every service you already pay for has every one of them.
Why do the pages have those strange addresses?
Because the station's eight streams lived at /streams/croozefm/, /streams/jazz/, /streams/smoothjazz/, /streams/lounge/, /streams/chillout/, /streams/easy/, /streams/dinner/ and /streams/classical/. Those links are still in people's bookmarks and in other people's pages. Keeping them alive costs nothing and sending them to a 404 would be rude.
What happened to the station?
It left FM in the middle of the 2010s — the English and Dutch Wikipedia articles disagree on whether that was 2015 or 2017, and I have not found a document that settles it. After that it ran online only. In 2022 Raf Geudens took it over and put it on a national DAB+ multiplex. Too few listeners followed, and it closed in May 2024. The webstreams and the site kept running for a while and then stopped around the end of February 2026.
Is there anything left of it?
A group of listeners started NUCROOZE, an ad-free online station in the same spirit, run by a Slovak non-profit. It states plainly that it has no link to the original either. It is not us and we are not it; if you want a stream rather than a reading list, start there.
Why eight pages and not one long one?
Because "smooth jazz" and "chillout" are two different evenings and pretending otherwise is how you end up with a playlist nobody finishes. The division is the station's own, and after a year of using it I think it was right.
Why five records and not fifty?
Fifty is a library. Five is an evening. If five are not enough, each page ends with the two stations next door to it.
Who writes this?
One person, in Antwerp, with no label, PR agency or streaming service paying for a mention. If that ever changes it will be written at the top of the page it affects.
Can I suggest a record?
Yes, and the address is below. Tell me which station it belongs to and which of the five it should push out. The second half is the part that makes it a real suggestion.
Billie HolidayThelonious MonkSarah VaughanDjango ReinhardtDizzy GillespieBilly StrayhornAl GreyDuke EllingtonBillie HolidayThelonious MonkSarah VaughanDjango ReinhardtDizzy GillespieBilly StrayhornAl GreyDuke Ellington

Write to Nocturne

By post
Antwerp, Belgium

Contact

Suggestions, corrections and arguments are all welcome. Corrections get fixed fastest.

If you are writing about a factual error, a link to the source saves us both an afternoon.

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