Jazz

JAZZ begins in the 1890s in New Orleans where the sounds of marching bands, Italian opera and Caribbean rhythms fill the streets with a diverse musical culture. Here, African-American musicians create a new music out of these ingredients.

Speakeasies, flappers, and easy money.

As the stock market soars, jazz is everywhere and soloists and singers – Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke and Benny Goodman – take center stage. In New York, Duke Ellington goes uptown to Harlem’s most celebrated nightspot, the Cotton Club.

Louis Armstrong revolutionizes American popular song and becomes one of the nation’s top entertainers. Duke Ellington takes jazz “beyond category,” composing hit tunes with a sophistication that has critics comparing him to Stravinsky.

Jazz has a new name – Swing. Bandleaders are matinee idols, with teenagers jitterbugging to the music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmie Lunceford, and Glenn Miller. Billie Holiday emerges as the greatest of all female jazz singers.

The pulsing Kansas City sound of Count Basie’s band comes to New York and quickly reignites the spirit of Swing. By the decade’s end Duke Ellington has been hailed as a hero in Europe.

In Europe, jazz has been banned by the Nazis, but great musicians continue to play. For many black Americans, however, that sound has a hollow ring. They find themselves fighting abroad for liberties their own country denies them at home.

Cold War tensions are reflected in the broken rhythms and dissonant melodies of “bebop.” Dizzy Gillespie tries to popularize the new sound, however, young audiences are now swooning over pop singers like Frank Sinatra.

As the turbulent Sixties arrive, however, two freewheeling saxophonists – John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman – take jazz into uncharted terrain. For the first time, even musicians are starting to ask, Is it still jazz?

During the Sixties, jazz is in trouble.