Original subtitles

[St. louis Bluesplaying]

man, voice-over: What occasions the focusing of attention on the negro?

Granted that white people have long enjoyed the negro entertainment as a diversion.

Is it not something different, something more,

when they bodily throw themselves into negro entertainment in cabarets?

Now negroes go to their own cabarets to see how white people act,

and what do we see?

Why, we see them actually playing negro games.

I watch them in that epidemic negroism, the Charleston.

I look on and envy them.

They camel and fishtail and Turkey,

they geechee and black bottom and scrontch,

they skate and buzzard and mess around--

and they do them all better than I!

This interest in the negro is an active and participating interest.

It is almost as if a traveler from the north stood watching an African tribe dance,

then suddenly found himself swept wildly into it,

caught in its tribal rhythm.

Maybe these nordics at last have tuned in to our wavelength.

Maybe they are at last learning to speak our language.

Rudolf Fisher, The American Mercury.

wynton marsalis: I think that when the martians come down here and they start attacking people,

they're going to look for everybody who can play some blues.

They're gonna say, "now who can play some blues,

cause we need that feeling up here."

And if you can't play the blues, well, they might zap you.

You know, but if you can play some blues, you pull your horn out,

they'll say, "ok, you can come here."

[Therambleplaying]

Narrator: Jazz had been born in New Orleans and brought up in Chicago and New York,

but by the mid 1920s,

it was being played in dance halls and speakeasies everywhere.

The blues, which had once been the product of itinerant black musicians,

the poorest of the southern poor,

had now fused with jazz and become an industry,

with black record labels as well as white ones competing for the listener's dollar.

Dancing consumed a country

confident that the unprecedented prosperity of the roaring twenties would never end.

More than 100 dance bands regularly crisscrossed the wide-open spaces

between St. Louis and Denver, Texas and Nebraska, playing one-nighters.

They were called "territory bands"--

the coon-Sanders nighthawks, the alphonso Trent and doc Ross and Troy Floyd orchestras;

Jesse stone's blue serenaders, George e. Lee and his singing novelty orchestra,

Walter page and his blue devils, and Andy kirk's clouds of joy.

There were "all-girl" orchestras on the road now, too,

including babe egan's Hollywood redheads,

a band billed as the twelve vampires,

and the parisian redheads, who really came from Indiana.

Records, and then radio,

brought jazz to locations so remote that no band could reach them.

[Wea Bluesplaying]

Narrator: Jazz continued to change--

an exuberant, collective music now came to place more and more emphasis

on the innovations of supremely gifted individuals.

For the first time, improvising soloists and singers

struggling to find their own voices and to tell their own stories

would take center stage.

Two extraordinary singers would emerge--

bessie Smith, whose huge recorded voice made the blues big business in black america;

and Ethel waters, whose blend of elegance and soulfulness

opened the door for African Americans to a world of entertainment

that had previously been almost exclusively white.

A troubled high-school dropout from Iowa named bix beiderbecke

would inspire a generation of young white musicians

to believe that they, too, could contribute to the music.

Duke Ellington would take his youthful band into Harlem's most celebrated club,

give its white patrons far more than they bargained for,

and help create a whole new language for jazz.

Meanwhile, Louis Armstrong would make a series of astonishing records

that would change all of American music forever.

[Cornet chop sue Playing]

Gary giddins: As late as the 1920s and probably for some years afterwards,

you have all of the Harvard brahmins,

the northeastern musical establishment,

routinely meeting and discussing where is American music?

How are we going to develop a truly American music?

Of course, they're assuming that they're going to find the great American musician

in the only place they know to look which is the academy, their home.

And they assume it's going to be in the only tradition they know,

which is in the European tradition.

So they're not at all

conscious of the fact that

at the same time

that they're agonizing,

looking for an American bach, that he's there,

but he doesn't fit their description.

Marsalis: You listen to his sound and all the musicians imitated him.

Everybody on every instrument tried to play like him.

Clarinet, saxophone, bass, drums.

Duke Ellington once said he wanted Louis Armstrong on every instrument.

The rhythm was great, the syncopation, like he, just his rhythm,

you take something like just the way he played,

de de de, de be doo dip, boo be doo be oo doody oo doo dit...

He had that jump and that bounce in his playing.

[Gully low bluePlaying]

Narrator: By 1925,p Louis Armstrong had become the greatest star

in Fletcher Henderson's great band,

playing nightly for white dancers at roseland,

the most popular ballroom in New York.

Musicians everywhere bought Henderson's records

just to hear Armstrong.

And shook their heads in disbelief

at the power with which he played.

But he was no longer happy in the Henderson outfit.

He disliked the sloppiness of the other members of the band

who drank too hard, often arrived late-- and sometimes not at all.

"I was always serious about my music," he remembered.

He felt that he was not being featured often enough with the band.

And he liked to sing now, too,

but Henderson thought his style too "black" for roseland.

In November of 1925, Armstrong quit Henderson's band and returned to Chicago

where he joined his wife lil's group at the dreamland cafe.

[Hotter than tha Playing]

She insisted that he be billed as "the world's greatest trumpet player."

Such praise embarrassed him.

"I never did want to be a big mucky-muck star," he recalled.

When he agreed to appear at the vendome movie theater with erskine Tate's orchestra,

and Tate asked him to go on stage when he soloed, Armstrong refused to do it.

He wouldn't leave the pit,

he said, for fear of alienating the rest of the band.

But they shone a spotlight down on him, anyway,

and when it found his gleaming horn and he began to play,

sometimes hitting 50 high "c's" in a row as the crowd counted along with him,

audiences went wild.

Armstrong: That's when Chicago was jumping, too.

They was lined up for blocks every night

to hear that old boy hit that high "e."

[Laugh]

The guys would catch that show every night

to see if I was going to miss that note.

[Laugh] And I...

Interviewer: Did you ever?

Armstrong: Why, miss it?

I had it in my pocket all the time.

Narrator: One night, a promising young horn player from Nashville

had the misfortune of being asked to substitute for Armstrong.

Doc cheatham: Louis came over to me...He says, "doc cheatham."

I said, "yes."

He says, "how would you like to work for me at the vendome theater?

I want to take off on a Thursday."

I didn't want to do it,

but I felt that I needed some money in my pocket to eat on.

It was a big band, fiddles and everything.

They didn't notice me being there.

I was sitting there with my cornet.

And so, they came down

to Louis' introduction,

and Tate's brother said,

"that's you."

So, I got up and blew on the cornet.

De-da-da-Dee-da, ba-ba-ba-Dee-da-dum-bum-bum.

The people started screaming.

You couldn't hear, I mean, I never saw anything like it in my life, for one second.

Then it stopped, it died.

The whole applause died, died right down for nothing

'cause they, they noticed that I wasn't Louis.

I felt like dropping dead!

[Heebie jeebiePlaying]

Narrator: It was at the vendome that Armstrong introduced a new novelty number

called Heebie jeebies In which he sang--

and also improvised sounds with his voice

in a way few had ever heard outside of New Orleans.

There's an apocryphal story that which of course means it could or could not be true.

I think it was true.

That during the recording of a song called Heebie jeebies,

the music slipped off the music rack and onto the floor.

And time in the studios in those days was so precious

that there was no stopping and re-taking,

so he just started to play the words with his voice

like he would with his trumpet and that ended up being called scat singing.

Armstrong: Well, we're playing Heebie jeebies

I and got this music and I don't know,

it slipped out of my hand, and I looked in the control room

and the president of the okeh record company keep saying

"go ahead, go ahead, keep on,"

and it dawned on me cause we used to scat sing.

We didn't call it scatting then,

but we used to hum like instruments,

[scats]

So when he said keep on,

I said [scats]

That's how Heebie jeebies Went over.

When we were finished he said,

"well satchmo this is where scatting was born."

Armstrong: ♪ those heebie jeebie blues ♪

♪ that they call it, boys ♪

♪ mix it in with a little bit of joy ♪

♪ say, don't you know it ♪

Narrator: Armstrong's recording of Heebie jeebie Swas released in 1926

and was a hit in black neighborhoods all across the country.

♪ They call the heebie jeebies ♪

♪ yes, ma'am, mama's got the heebie jeebies dance ♪

[Scatting]

♪ Say, come on now, and do that dance ♪

♪ they call the heebie jeebies dance ♪

♪ sweet mama ♪

Narrator: "For months after that,"

the Chicago clarinetist mezz mezzrow remembered,

"you would hear cats greeting each other with Louis' riffs."

Armstrong's scatting, mezzrow remembered,

"almost drove the English language out of the windy city for good."

Armstrong: Woo! Got the heebie jeebies!

Man: What you doing with the heebies?

I just had to have the heebies!

[Backwat Ebluesplaying]

Woman: ♪ it rained 5 days and the skies turned dark as night ♪

♪ well, it rained 5 days and the skies turned dark as night ♪

Narrator: In the spring of 1927, a train carrying a blues singer and her band

stopped suddenly outside a southern Ohio town.

A great flood had inundated the valley,

and the railroad tracks were covered by water.

The troupe had to be ferried by rowboat to the theater they were playing.

The audience asked her to sing a blues about the flood.

She said she was sorry she didn't know one,

but as soon as she got home she wrote one out.

♪ Backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go ♪

♪ backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go ♪

♪ 'cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more ♪

Narrator: Her name was bessie Smith

and her public-- overwhelmingly black, mostly poor--

always looked to her to say what they could not.

[Downhearted blu Eplaying]

Narrator: Bessie Smith lived the kind of life she sang about in her songs.

♪ Gee, but it's hard to love someone ♪

♪ when that someone don't love you ♪

Narrator: She had come up the hard way,

singing for pennies on street corners at age 9.

But almost from the moment she recorded Downhearted blues In 1923,

Smith was the unchallenged "empress of the blues."

♪ Trouble, trouble, I've had it all my days ♪

Narrator: "When I was a little girl,"

the gospel singer mahalia Jackson remembered,

"I felt she was having troubles like me.

She expressed something we couldn't put into words."

♪ It seems that trouble's going to follow me to my grave ♪

Narrator: Bessie Smith sold so many records,

got so famous that she was cast in an early sound film,--

one of the first to feature black performers.

♪ My man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea ♪

♪ my man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea ♪

♪ my man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea ♪

Narrator: Smith drank hard and had a fearful temper.

If she didn't like the way things were going onstage,

she sometimes tore the curtains down around her.

She could not abide rivals and distrusted powerful accompanists

for fear they'd steal the spotlight.

Cheatham: After her performance she sent for me.

And so I put my horn down and went up there and she says,

"you little son-of-a-gun," say, "you playing too damn loud."

Said, "don't play loud like that on my..."

And she gave me hell, "on, on my song."

So, I knew, I, I was playing a little loud on the saxophone at that time.

But that's, that's the only problem I had with bessie Smith.

But she was a lovely person to know

and could sing like the devil.

Smith: ♪ there ain't nothing I can do ♪

Narrator: One sweltering July night in 1927,

Smith and her troupe were performing under a tent in Concord, north Carolina.

When a member of the band slipped out for a breath of fresh air,

he spotted half a dozen members of the ku klux klan headed their way.

The musician ran inside and told bessie to run.

Bessie wouldn't hear of it.

She stormed out of the tent, ran toward the klansmen instead,

shaking her fist and cursing.

"I'll get the whole damn tent out here," she shouted.

"You just pick up them sheets and run."

Faced with bessie Smith and a tent full of her loyal fans,

the klansmen fled.

Smith returned to the bandstand and began again to sing.

Smith: ♪ 't ain't nobody's bizness if I do ♪

Narrator: "Nobody messed with bessie," a niece remembered,

"black or white, it didn't make any difference."

♪ If I go to church on Sunday ♪

♪ then just shimmy down on Monday ♪

♪ 't ain't nobody's bizness if I do, if I do ♪

Early: I play a lot of music for my children,

but I think that the music that I play for them

that I most want them to listen to is blues.

There's something about blues as an expression of the human condition

that is just so powerful.

If there was no Ralph Ellison, there was no Harlem renaissance,

no Marcus garvey, no Elijah Muhammad,

no Frederick douglass,

black people hadn't achieved anything else on this earth

but just the creation of blues, it would make them,

it would still make black people a seminally important people

in the creation of the modern world.

[Stop and listen blu Eplaying]

Man, voice-over: There's 14 million negroes in our great country,

and they will buy records if recorded by one of their own

because we are the only folks that can sing and interpret hot jazz songs

just off the griddle correctly.

Perry Bradford.

Narrator: The records bessie Smith and her rivals made

were a sensation in black communities all over the country.

Newsboys sold blues records.

So did door-to-door salesmen.

Pullman porters carried copies south with them and peddled them at whistle-stops.

The Chicago defenderUrgedd "lovers of music everywhere

and those who desire to help in any advance of the race"

to buy the work of black singers and musicians.

Before long, okeh, Paramount, vocalion, and Columbia

had all developed specialty catalogues meant for black audiences--race records--

just as they had alread special ethnic catalogues for other minorities.

Race records were soon selling more than 5 million copies a year,

and black entrepreneurs were eager to get in on the action.

The pianist Clarence Williams became an impresario

and made more money publishing music, managing talent,

and producing records than he ever had performing.

Black swan, the first African-American recording company,

was established with the slogan,

"the only genuine colored record--others are only passing for colored."

All stockholders, all employees, and all artists were black.

Studs terkel: And I'd have to travel,

travel by streetcar, I'd pass the black belt.

I noticed places called gallimaufry shops,

I saw records there-- jazz, I thought,

I found nickel and dime used records,

they were called vocalion, blue bird, okeh,

and there was big bill broonzy, there was tampa red,

there was Memphis minnie, there was peetie wheatstraw,

the high sheriff of hell,

devil's son-in-law.

There was

big maceo merriweather.

There was Memphis slim and there were,

hearing, many was double entendre, blues,

but I heard the blues.

I never heard music like that before...

Ever.

♪ They took my baby to the buryin' ground ♪

♪ and I watched the pall bearers as slowly let her down ♪

Narrator: Meanwhile, across the country,

from San Francisco to New York City,

the jazz age showed no signs of slowing down.

[Boot to booPlaying]

Man, voice-over: It was an age of miracles,

it was an age of art,

it was an age of excess,

and it was an age of satire.

We were the most powerful nation.

Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun?

Scarcely had the staider citizens of the republic caught their breaths

when the wildest of all generations,

the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the war,

brusquely shouldered them out of the way and danced into the limelight.

It was a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.

The jazz age now raced along under its own power

served by great filling stations full of money.

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

[Davenport bluesPlaying]

Giddins: There were a lot of young white musicians around the country

who were trying to play jazz.

Some of them were very talented musicians,

some of them were not, as usual,

but most of them, certainly all the good ones,

knew that the really great figures in the music were black,

and they were trying to play like them.

They heard Louis Armstrong, they heard Ethel waters sing,

or bessie Smith, they heard Coleman Hawkins.

They said, "wow, these guys are doing something with these instruments.

I want to play that music."

Bix beiderbecke was the first of the white musicians who had unmistakable genius.

And so his importance to a lot of the young white musicians was,

"look, he proves it."

He proves that we can play this music.

It's possible for a white musician to make a real,

original contribution to jazz.

Narrator: Leon bix beiderbecke,

one of the most promising and one of the most tragic figures in the history of jazz,

emerged not from the great cities of New Orleans, Chicago, or New York,

but from the rural heartland.

He was born at 1934 grand Avenue in Davenport, Iowa,

on march 10, 1903.

If his father, an industrious, church-going presbyterian had had his way,

his boy would have never played a note of jazz.

From the age of 3, bix showed unusual musical ability.

By the age of 8, he was out-playing his piano teacher.

But he could not bear authority of any kind

and never bothered to master more than the rudiments of written music,

a failing that added to the self-doubt that would haunt him all his life.

[Tiger r Playing]

When his older brother returned from world war I

with a wind-up victrola and an armful of records,

including Tiger rag, By the original dixieland jazz band,

bix was transfixed.

He played it over and over again,

then borrowed a neighbor's cornet and began to imitate the raw new sounds he heard.

Before long, he was hanging around the riverfront,

listening to the jazz bands that performed aboard the steamboats that docked at Davenport.

The musician who made the biggest impression on him was Louis Armstrong,

who was then just beginning to make a name for himself.

Margo Jefferson: What would he have heard?

Some kind of explosion, I think,

of rhythm and sound

possibilities that must have

matched things inside him that he knew had nothing to do with

what his parents wanted for him.

And to hear this music would have broken all of that.

And that was clearly what he needed to become something, to become himself.

Narrator: Jazz music became his obsession

and bix was soon good enough on the cornet to play alongside older musicians.

And he often joined them behind the bandstand between sets to drink bootleg gin.

His parents were horrified,

and in 1921, abruptly pulled him out of high school

and sent him off to a strict boarding school in lake forest, Illinois.

[Tea Playing]

Narrator: If the beiderbeckes had hoped their son

would abandon music or the musician's life,

they were quickly disappointed.

Lake forest was only a short train ride away from Chicago,

where Louis Armstrong would soon be playing the best jazz in america.

Within a week of his arrival at school,

bix was writing home to tell his brother that he had talked his way into 3 black clubs

on the south side in eager search of what he called "real jazz niggers."

"I'd go to hell," he wrote, "to hear a good band."

Marsalis: A musician loves music and loves that instrument.

And when they hear someone that's great on that instrument,

there's a mixture of great envy, respect, and love,

you going out every night,

you hearing the greatest musician in the world play-- Louis Armstrong--

and all you want to do is be able to play.

You've been told "don't listen to them, and they're not doing it.

"These are niggers, and they ain't playing nothing,

and this is some coon music, and it's all a joke."

But you realize it's the most serious thing you've ever

encountered in your life.

And then you realize that you, too, are a part of it.

And it's got to be exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.

Because to accept jazz music,

means that at a certain time, you would have to accept

something about the humanity of the United States negro.

[Goose pimpl Playing]

Narrator: Bix slipped into the city so often to see and hear his heroes play

that he was expelled from lake forest.

His father angrily ordered him home to Iowa

to work in the family coal business.

Bix could bear only a few weeks of weighing coal

before he returned to Chicago to hear and play the jazz music he loved.

Nothing else seemed to matter to him --

his clothes were unpressed, he mislaid possessions,

forgot what day it was, carried his cornet in a paper bag.

"Music was the one thing that really brought him to life," a friend remembered.

"Not even whiskey could do it, and he gave Itevery chance."

Sudhalter: Everybody drank in those years, of course.

Social drinking

was something that,

especially in the music

business with its schedules

and strange hours, was rife.

But bix did it to extremes.

[Riverbo Ashuffleplaying]

Narrator: In 1924, bix joined a band called the wolverines,

which played at roadhouses and clubs in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

When the wolverines made their first records for gennett,

they were a hit, and bix beiderbecke was the star.

Using an unorthodox system of fingering,

he had developed a cornet style unlike anyone else's--

bright, clear, and crisp.

Beiderbecke's distinctive sound, the guitarist Eddie condon remembered,

was "like a girl saying Yes."

man, voice-over: All my life I had been listening to music,

but I had never heard anything remotely resembling what bix beiderbecke played.

For the first time I realized that music isn't all the same,

that some people play so differently from others

that it becomes an entirely new set of sounds.

Eddie condon.

The harmonies and the beautiful musical changes he played.

That was something new.

No one ever heard that played those beautiful changes like bix bei--no one.

[Clementinplaying]

Narrator: In 1926, bix started touring with the Jean goldkette orchestra--

the hottest white dance band in america.

Artie Shaw: The first really great white jazz band,

big band that is, was Jean goldkette.

This band was composed of

fine musicians, and in it,

in the mid-twenties,

that band was unbelievable.

They're still, you listen to records like,

let's say Clementine, To this day, it swings like mad.

Narrator: The musical leader of the goldkette orchestra,

and bix's best friend in the band,

was the saxophone player frank trumbauer, called "tram."

They were opposites in many ways:

Tram was debonair and business-like;

bix was disorganized and insecure.

But for a brief time,

theirs would prove one of the most creative partnerships in jazz.

[Singin' the blu Eplaying]

Narrator: In 1927, as the stock market soared to record heights,

trumbauer and bix recorded their greatest hit, Singin' the blues.

trumbauer's opening solo was light, relaxed and supple.

And beiderbecke's brilliant chorus picked up where trumbauer's left off.

James Lincoln Collier: He had that lyric quality.

It had that rhythmic swing,

that conversational effect, the sense of speech,

the sense that somebody is talking to you,

saying something very important.

Narrator: Beiderbecke and trumbauer's recording of Singin' the blues

inspired a generation of young musicians, white and black,

who would imitate it for years and quote from it for decades.

Bix was becoming a success, but his estrangement from his father,

his persistent self-doubt, and his growing dependence on alcohol

threatened to sabotage everything he had achieved.

[In a mi Playing]

Man, voice-over: Bix loved jazz

but there are many kinds of love: Joyous, zestful, desperate.

There is a kind of love that is a gloomy, confused dependency,

never fulfilled and therefore insatiable,

a love that asks more of its object than it can give.

I felt that what bix wanted from music, jazz never truly gave him.

[Summertimplaying]

Man, voice-over: It was always the music that explained things.

What it is that takes you out of being just a kid and thinking it's all adventure,

and you find there's a lesson underneath all that adventure.

You come into life alone and you go out of it alone,

and you're going to be alone a lot of times when you're on this earth--

and what tells it all, it's the music.

Sidney bechet.

Giddins: Until 1925, there was really only one musician in the whole world

who could keep company with Louis Armstrong and not embarrass himself,

and that was Sidney bechet.

And there were records that Armstrong and bechet made together,

where bechet plays with such brilliance,

both in his sound and his maturity of his concept

and the complete absence of frills and any kind of sentimentality

and the way he swings and his understanding of the blues.

He was a very profound musician.

Narrator: Back in November of 1922, Sidney bechet,

the New Orleans clarinet-master, had landed in New York after nearly 3 years abroad.

He had just 10 shillings in his pocket--

issued to him by British jailers who had deported him

after he served 11 months for a violent altercation with a prostitute.

He was still only 25 and had yet to be recorded,

but he was already a legend among jazz musicians,

both for the power and brilliance of his playing

and for the belligerent personality

which seemed to plunge him into trouble wherever he went.

When he finally got into the recording studio,

he was playing a new instrument, the soprano saxophone.

[Cakewalkin' babiesPlaying]

The cornet or trumpet was supposed to play the lead in New Orleans jazz

but not if Sidney bechet could help it.

His huge, throbbing sound overwhelmed everyone who played with him,

was unlike anything anyone had ever heard before.

When Coleman Hawkins,

the saxophone star of Fletcher Henderson's band,

was overheard saying that New Orleans musicians couldn't play,

bechet hurried down to the band box club to challenge him

and played so furiously that Hawkins packed his horn and fled the stand.

Bechet followed him down the street, still playing.

He got a job with James p. Johnson,

the Harlem stride piano master,

but quit when Johnson insisted he stick to the arrangements.

He tried Duke Ellington's orchestra, too,

but got fired after he arrived 3 days late

and claimed that his cab driver had gotten lost.

He opened a Harlem speakeasy-- the club basha--

only to back out after a quarrel with his partner over an exotic dancer.

Marsalis: Once, there was a guy named garvin bushell.

He said, somebody knocked on his door at like 3:00 in the morning,

and he said he opened the door and it was Sidney bechet

standing there with a dog.

And he says, "well, you know,

it's like 3:00 in the morning, what's happening?"

And Sidney looked at him and said,

"I heard that you had a dog that you said was more dog than my dog."

He's bringing his dog there and he wants to see whose dog is more dog.

And really, that you know, that was Sidney.

You combine it with that type of overwhelming musical genius,

which is the ability to hear,

to construct these perfect lines,

to give his music organization,

and to just let that soul come through.

That soul was something.

[Jungle drumPlaying]

Narrator: In 1925, bechet's luck seemed to turn.

He sailed again for Europe to join the all-black cast

of a new Paris musical, La revue negre.

by now France-- and much of Europe--

had become fascinated with Africa

and with African Americans and the new music they made.

It all struck them as exotic, romantic, "primitive."

La revue negre made an international sensation

of the American dance the French called "le Charleston,"

and an international star of its lead dancer,

a teen-aged ex-chorus girl from St. Louis named Josephine baker.

French critics called her "the black Venus,"

compared her to a snake, a giraffe, a kangaroo.

When she paraded along the boulevards with a live cheetah,

admirers speculated as to which "animal" was more wonderfully savage.

"The white imagination," baker admitted privately,

"is sure something when it comes to blacks."

When baker left the show to become a star on her own,

Sidney bechet found himself touring with the remnants of the cast--

Istanbul, Cairo, Berlin, Oslo, Moscow.

They were bringing jazz to regions so remote

that passersby sometimes wet their fingers and rubbed bechet's cheek

to see if the color came off.

In 1928, bechet was back in Paris, living in montmartre, and in trouble again.

[Dear old southlandPlaying]

Stanley crouch: He's supposed to be playing with this piano player,

and the story goes, this piano player says,

"bechet. That was a d-minor 7th.

You playing the wrong chord."

Bechet is supposed to have pulled a pistol out and said,

"Sidney bechet never plays wrong chords."

He got in an argument with somebody over the chord changes to a song.

So the guy says, the chord was one thing, and Sidney says it was another,

he say, "meet me tomorrow at 4:30 and we'll settle this in a duel."

Bechet got in a gunfight in Paris during rush hour.

Not, "I'll meet you here at midnight," right?

Nothing like that.

If you gonna a gunfight in Paris as a person who's not French,

it would seem to me that you would want it to be as late as possible

so as few French people as possible might see you.

Not bechet.

Narrator: Bechet's bullets missed his intended target,

but hit another musician in the leg and slightly wounded two women

who happened to be standing nearby.

He was sentenced to 15 months in prison,

but was released after 11 provided he left the country immediately.

Marsalis: But that's how serious he was about music.

He's going to kill somebody over some chord changes.

And he had that look in his face, too, see it's like a certain type of look,

like when you, I've seen pictures of him where,

you could see him smiling, you know, he was devilish.

So he'd be talking he had that look of like, "if you telling me, I'm going to..."

You know, and that's how his playing is,

and it has that light in it.

Early: White people were hearing something in jazz

that says something deeply about their experience.

I'm not sure that it would have been this way if we were not a country of immigrants,

and so many people who felt kind of displaced.

You had this music that kind of captured some feeling of that.

I think that that was part of its amazing appeal

was how it spoke to feeling out of sort and out of joint and maladjusted.

[Dem trisker rebbin's chosid Playing]

Woman, voice-over: Chicago, 1910.

The streets are inexpressibly dirty,

the number of schools inadequate,

sanitary legislation unenforced,

the street lighting bad,

the paving miserable and altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets,

and the stables foul beyond description.

Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street sewer.

The older and richer inhabitants seem anxious to move away as rapidly as possible.

Jane Addams.

Narrator: In 1902, a Jewish refugee from Poland named David Goodman,

fleeing Russian persecution, had moved his family

to the crowded West Side of Chicago.

It was there on may 30, 1909,

that his wife dora gave birth to their ninth child, Benjamin.

The family lived packed together,

sometimes in unheated basement apartments,

forced to move again and again when there was too little money to pay the rent.

There were days, Benny Goodman remembered, when "there wasn't anything to eat.

"I don't mean much to eat.

I mean anything."

Collier: The situation was just impossible.

The father was working shoveling lard in the meat yards in Chicago,

and he would come home stinking with the smell of the lard

and the animal refuse that he had been dealing with

and Benny said he never forgot that.

He remembered that all his life, that smell.

Narrator: David Goodman was determined that his children would do better in america

than he had done.

And when he heard that a neighbor's boys were earning extra family income

by playing in a dance band, he saw a way for his sons to begin their climb.

Phoebe Jacobs: Well Benny did go to Hebrew school,

as is the custom of all good Jewish boys.

They go to cheder and they learn how to be a bar mitzvah boy

and in going to the Hebrew school,

they had instruments there.

And Benny went with his two brothers and he was the smallest of the trio of Goodman boys,

so he got the littlest instrument,

the clarinet,

'cause it was very light.

His brother, Harry,

who was a big zaftig guy,

he got the bass.

So, that's how Benny was introduced to music.

[Waitin' for kat Iplaying]

Narrator: Somehow, David Goodman managed to come up with 50 cents a week

to buy his 10-year-old boy lessons from a classically trained German clarinetist.

From the beginning, Benny was unusually talented--

and unusually serious about his craft.

He practiced every day, religiously, all his life.

Collier: He was clearly better than everybody else.

He was one of these guys who was utterly confident,

even when he was 12 years old.

He was never shy about standing up and playing,

he could walk out on a stage anywhere, even as a little boy

and he was great, he was completely confident in what he could do.

I guess he treated the music like a kid might

who loved baseball, who loved his baseball bat.

His horn was everything to him.

And anything he could make come out of it was exquisite,

and he was constantly a perfectionist.

He was listening to jazz in Chicago then.

There was a lot of jazz.

Louis Armstrong was there,

there were a lot of wonderful musicians

and I guess Benny always adored and respected the way

the black man handled his music.

Because all through Benny's life,

he went up to Harlem when he was in New York,

or in Chicago he would go to the dance halls,

and he treated his horn and his music

like a lover would a gorgeous woman.

Narrator: Goodman listened to all the great black clarinetists in town--

Johnny dodds, jimmie noone, buster Bailey.

By the age of 14, Goodman was playing with pickup bands

made up of musicians far older than he,

and he was making $15 a night,

3 times as much as his father could earn

working 12 hours a day in the stockyards.

He dropped out of school to pursue music full-time.

In August of 1925,

he was playing at the midway gardens,

an outdoor pavilion on the south side designed by frank Lloyd Wright,

when he got an offer to go to California

to join a dance band led by the singer Ben pollack.

♪ Oh, you're happy today ♪

♪ you may be gone... ♪

But Goodman was still only 16 and had to talk his parents

into letting him make the long journey west.

Benny Goodman was now earning enough to feed the entire family.

Collier: So they bought a newsstand for the father so he could be outside.

It was better work, it was, you know, easier, and in fact,

they even said to him, "dad, you know you don't have to work anymore,"

but he said, "no," he said, "I'm a man, I'm going to work."

[Goodbyplaying]

Narrator: On the evening of December 9, 1926,

on his way home from work, David Goodman was struck by an automobile.

He died without ever having seen his son play in a professional band.

He had been waiting, he'd told his son,

'till he could afford a decent suit so that he would not be too conspicuous

among the well-dressed dancers.

For the rest of his life, Benny Goodman could not mention his father

without having his eyes fill with tears,

but the tragedy, combined with the hardship and crowding of his youth,

would inspire in him a relentless drive to better himself.

In just 10 years, Benny Goodman would become the most popular musician in america.

[Organ grinder bluesPlaying]

Man, voice-over: It was a sure-enough honky-tonk,

occupying the cellar of a saloon.

It was the social center of what was then, and still is,

negro Harlem's kitchen.

♪ Organ grinder ♪

♪ organ grinder ♪

Here a tall brown-skinned girl,

unmistakably the one guaranteed in the song to make a preacher lay his Bible down,

used to sing and dance her own peculiar numbers,

vesting them with their own originality.

She was known simply as Ethel.

Rudolf Fisher.

Ethel: ♪ if you'll just cure my organ of those grinding blues ♪

Narrator: Ethel waters, one of the most influential of all American singers,

was born in the red-light district of Chester, Pennsylvania,

the unwanted outcome of a rape.

By the age of 10, she was the leader of a gang of children of every nationality

who stole food to survive

and acted as lookouts for the pimps and prostitutes

in their neighborhood.

"God," waters said later, "made me tough, headstrong, and resilient."

[My handy maPlaying]

She began her musical career as a shimmy dancer and singer,

billed as "sweet mama stringbean."

"I sure knew how to roll and quiver," she remembered,

and soon found herself appearing in black theaters and tent shows

for $10 a week.

♪ He shakes my ashes ♪

♪ greases my griddle ♪

♪ churns my butter ♪

♪ strokes my fiddle ♪

♪ my man is such a handy man ♪

♪ he threads my needle... ♪

Narrator: Some of her records were in the bawdiest blues tradition--

organ grinder blues, Do what you did last night, My handy man.

but unlike bessie Smith and the other blues stars of her time,

she had a light, clear voice and specialized in soft insinuation.

[I got rhythPlaying]

♪ I got rhythm, I got music ♪

♪ I got my man ♪

♪ who could ask for anything more? ♪

♪ I got daisies... ♪

Narrator: In 1921, her manager insisted she try what he called "white time,"

the all-white vaudeville circuit.

She was certain she would fail.

"I thought white people wouldn't understand my type of work," she recalled,

"and I wasn't going to change it."

But white people loved her: One critic hailed waters as

"the greatest artist of her race and generation."

♪ Days can be sunny... ♪

Narrator: She was singing popular songs now,

the best songs from tin pan alley's best songwriters,

infusing them with the passion and artistry of the blues,

bringing that hybrid sound to mainstream america for the first time.

♪ I'm saying ♪

♪ I got rhythm, I got music ♪

♪ I got my man ♪

♪ who could ask for anything more? ♪

♪ Lord, I got daisies and they're in green pastures ♪

♪ I got my man ♪

♪ who could ask for anything more? ♪

♪ Old man trouble, I don't mind him ♪

♪ you won't find him 'round my door ♪

♪ I got starlight and I have sweet dreams ♪

♪ I've got my man ♪

♪ who could ask for anything more? ♪

♪ Who could ask for anything more? ♪

Giddins: She made the transition from blues to popular songs,

and she was able to take those songs

and sing them in a way that was modern and important.

They weren't torch songs

when she did them.

They weren't sentimental

when she did them.

They weren't flowery

when she did them.

And just to give you one instance of how,

the kind of impact she had,

Sophie Tucker, who was considerably older

and who was the queen of vaudeville, a great, great star,

paid Ethel waters money for singing lessons

when Ethel was just in her 20s, and just getting started.

Because Sophie Tucker realized that the day was changing,

and she better find out what this new singing is all about.

Narrator: Waters' singing influenced nearly every kind of American popular music,

and she became the first black woman

to headline at the palace in New York.

She was for a time the best-paid woman in show business,

black or white,

and had proven that it was possible for black singers

to appeal to every kind of audience.

♪ I'm just a woman ♪

♪ a lonely woman ♪

♪ waitin' on the weary shore ♪

Narrator: In 1929, she went to Hollywood to appear in a film,

in which she sang Am I blue,

and utterly transcended the stereotyped plantation setting.

♪ Woke up this mornin' along about dawn ♪

♪ without a warnin'... ♪

Narrator: Waters would be revered by generations of singers.

Years later, Lena horne paid her the highest possible compliment.

Ethel waters, she said, was "the mother of us all."

♪ Am I blue? ♪

♪ Am I blue? ♪

♪ Ain't these tears in these eyes tellin' you? ♪

♪ Am I blue? ♪

♪ You'd be, too ♪

♪ now he's gone and we're through ♪

♪ am I blue? ♪

[Audience applauds]

[Doin' the froPlaying]

Man, voice-over: White people began to come to Harlem in droves.

For several years, they packed the expensive cotton club on lenox Avenue.

But I was never there,

because the cotton club was a Jim crow club

for gangsters and moneyed whites.

Nor did ordinary negroes like the growing influx of whites after sundown,

flooding the little cabarets and bars,

where formerly only colored people laughed and sang,

and where now, strangers were given the best ringside tables

to sit and stare at the negro customers,

like amusing animals in a zoo.

Langston Hughes

narrator: The spider's web and the nest,

basement brown's, and the hole in the wall,

the garden of joy, and the bucket of blood,

the shim sham, and the hotcha, and the yeah man,

Connie's inn, and the catagonia club, and small's paradise,

prohibition era Harlem was now home to more than 500 speakeasies,

most hidden behind non-descript storefronts and tucked away in alleys.

The most celebrated was the cotton club.

It's wealthy white patrons were eager to experience for themselves

something of the same supposedly "primitive" excitement of black life

that had made Josephine baker a star in Europe.

The club specialized in lavish floorshows featuring light-skinned chorus girls

billed as "tall, tan, and terrific."

Though blacks were barred as customers,

the cotton club was Harlem's premier showcase,

and it was the dream of every black bandleader to play there.

In 1927, word went out

that the gangsters in charge of the club

were looking for a brand-new band.

Man, voice-over: New York Amsterdam news. ..

One of the brightest spots in New York's night life is

Duke Ellington, conductor of what leading judges have called

the foremost colored jazz orchestra in america.

Ellington, until recently now was a "comer."

Today he has "arrived."

Watch his dust from now on.

[Jazz convulsion Playing]

Narrator: For almost 4 years,

Duke Ellington had been playing his "hot" music

at the Kentucky club off Times Square.

He had a manager now,

the shrewd, tough-talking Irving mills,

who in exchange for 55% of his client's earnings

and half of his music publishing rights,

was committed to making Duke Ellington a star.

When mills heard of the opening at the cotton club,

he arranged a tryout for Ellington.

He got the job.

It was the turning point in Ellington's career.

And it was at the cotton club that his sound,

filled with trumpet growls,

unusual harmonies, and chords no one had ever heard before,

was given a new and for some, demeaning name, "jungle music."

But whatever it was called, the music was hot, exotic, and sexy.

[East St. Louis toodle-o O playing]

Giddins: He's playing behind some pretty racy shows.

And he's providing a music that supports them, and so the music itself becomes erotic.

And so the band becomes a kind of participant with the dancers.

They're just as erotic, they're just as seamy.

They're just as mysterious and exciting and curious as the people on the stage.

Marsalis: Duke Ellington is like bacchus or dionysus.

He loves things carnal.

That's his domain.

And he's there to let you know what you need to be doing

and how you need to be doing it,

and at what tempo you need to be doing it in.

So he's indispensable.

[Doin' the voom voomPlaying]

Narrator: Ellington worked constantly,

writing song after song for the revues

that changed every 6 months.

The cotton club proved a priceless training ground for him,

setting the composing style he would follow for the rest of his life.

Giddins: One of the things about Ellington is that he is self-taught.

He is the ultimate autodidact.

He figures it out as he goes along.

He's not the kind of guy who learns that you voice a trumpet section in one, 3, 5,

and then he just goes and does it that way.

He'll voice the trumpet section

and throw in a baritone or a bass clarinet.

He'll cross-arrange with trombones and saxophones.

He would create dissonances and different kinds of harmonies,

so that he broke all the rules and created a whole new tone palette,

from which jazz composition would emerge.

Sanders: I think Duke believed

that he had this ability

to convey something special

he believed in his knowledge

of Harmony, which he developed

a harmonic language his own.

He knew the orchestra so well, the colors of each instrument,

but not just an instrument.

To Duke, a trumpet was not just a trumpet, it was an individual.

A saxophone was not just an instrument, but it was a person.

Giddins: He had a baritone saxophonist named Harry carney,

who had the most gorgeous sound on the baritone that has ever been heard.

So Ellington, he would voice the baritone out front.

This immediately gave him an original sound.

Radio announcer: Hello, everybody, welcome to our famous cotton club.

I'd like to have the pleasure of introducing

the greatest living master of jungle music.

The rip-roaring, Harmony hound, none other than Duke Ellington.

Let her go...

[Cotton club sto Mplaying]

Narrator: In late 1927, CBS brought a microphone into the cotton club,

and Duke Ellington became the first black bandleader in america

with a nationwide hook-up.

Collier: These were not necessarily late night broadcasts.

Some of these broadcasts were being done

at 6:00 in the afternoon, suppertime.

So that Duke was reaching out,

not just to a lot of jazz fans,

but he was reaching out to middle america,

he was reaching out to people who sat around

and listened to their radios

while they were having their suppers.

And very quickly he became a national name.

Narrator: In 1929, rko pictures made a short film

built around Ellington and his music.

What's that? Something you're writing?

That's a new number I'm writing...

Oh, play it for me!

Sure. Hotch!

Come on, let's round up and play.

Narrator: In an era when blacks were routinely portrayed on screen

as servants or savages, cotton-pickers or clowns,

Duke Ellington was presented as what he was,

a serious composer.

The film included his most ambitious work to date:

Black and tan fantasy.

it was an alluring, blues-oriented piece in 3 parts

that evoked the steamy atmosphere of the black-and-tan clubs scattered around Harlem:

The only clubs in which the races were free to mix and mingle.

[Black and tan fanta Splaying]

The composition ends

with a reference to chopin's Funeral march.

a sly reminder that good times never last.

His compositions may have been called "jungle music,"

but it was American negro life

that inspired everything he wrote...

[Harlem flat blu Eplaying]

Black beauty, jubilee stomp,

Saturday night function, Harlem flat blue S.

When someone asked why his music was so dissonant,

he said, "dissonance is OurWay of life in america.

We are something apart, yet, an integral part."

"I am not playing jazz," he told an interviewer.

"I am trying to play the natural feelings of a people."

Ellington was, in the admiring parlance of the times,

"a race man."

Sanders: His people were important to him.

He conveyed the life of the negro-American in different dimensions.

And he did it through music.

He captured their feelings, their moods,

their ups, their downs.

The titles of the songs

showed that Duke was very conscious of people around him.

From his earliest pieces like Black and tan fanta Sy,

he was already expressing a mood of a people,

and their struggles and their joys

as well as their sorrows.

Jefferson: What he was doing, was opening up

every kind of tonal, harmonic, rhythmic possibility

and saying all of these things are in our culture.

All of these things are within our means.

The point is, there's no limit.

Race is a set of possibilities and inventions.

It's not a set of rules and orders, and only struggles.

Narrator: All of his life,

Duke Ellington stubbornly refused ever to be categorized.

For him, the language of music

was the means of breaking down barriers,

of bringing all people together.

Interviewer: You've been quoted as saying that you write

now would you like to expound on that a little bit?

Ellington: Let's see. My people.

Now, which of my people?

I mean, you know, I'm in several groups, you know,

I'm in, let's see.

I'm in the group of the piano players;

I'm in the group of the listeners;

I'm in the groups of people who have general appreciation of music;

I'm in the group of those who aspire to be dilettantes;

I'm in the group of those who attempt

to produce something fit for the plateau;

I'm in the group of what now?

Oh, yeah, those who appreciate beaujolais.

[Laughs]

Well, and then of course, I'm in the--

of course, I've had such a strong influence

by the music of thepeople.

Thepeople, that's the better word,

thepeople, rather than my people,

because Thepeople are my people.

[Rose ro Playing]

Shaw: The thing is you're aiming at something that cannot be done.

Physically can't be done.

So you're trying to play a horn,

and here's this clumsy series of keys on a piece of wood,

and you're trying to manipulate them

with the Reed and the throat muscles,

and what they call an embouchure.

And you're trying to make something happen that never happened before.

You're tryin' to make a sound that no one ever got before,

creating an emotion.

You're trying to take an inarticulate thing

and take notes and make them come out

in a way that moves you.

If it moves you, it's gonna move others.

If you know it's right, and you feel this is something I meant,

but very rarely does it happen.

And when it does, you remember it for the rest of your life.

What can I say,

it's the most exuberant

experience you can have.

It beats sex.

It beats great food. It beats anything.

Narrator: Arthur Jacob arshawsky

was born on the lower east side of Manhattan in 1910,

the only child of immigrant dressmakers who eventually separated.

At seven, the family moved to new haven, Connecticut,

where the boy found himself an outcast,

tormented by schoolmates who ridiculed

his "foreign-sounding name"

and called him "sheeny" and "kike" and "Christ-killer."

Shaw: My father'd left home,

and I didn't like my life very much.

I didn't like school, I didn't like anything.

So it was a choice between getting a machine gun or an instrument.

Luckily I found an instrument.

[Sug Playing]

Narrator: He visited a vaudeville theater

and saw a musician in a snappy white-striped blazer

kneel down on one knee in the spotlight

and play a dreamy melody on a shiny gold saxophone.

"That did it," arshawsky said.

Music would be his way to fame and fortune.

Shaw: I'd heard a guy play,

and he was surrounded by nice lights and pretty girls,

it was interesting to me.

I thought, "this is the way I'd like to go."

Narrator: He worked in a grocery store

to earn money for a saxophone,

practiced so hard the inside of his lower lip bled,

and formed his own 4-piece band,

which he called the Peter Pan novelty orchestra.

He earned two dollars a night playing dances.

Shaw: First came the question of practicality,

getting a job, making a living.

I was determined that I would play this instrument,

so I quit school, and I managed to get flunked.

I worked it out so I got flunked twice in a row,

two months in a row, and they threw me out.

And despite my mother's pleas

with the principal at hillhouse high in new haven,

they wouldn't have me.

So that meant I was free to play.

[Cream pufPlaying]

Narrator: Like Benny Goodman,

who would one day be his great rival,

arshawsky took up the clarinet

and joined a touring dance band as a full-time professional.

Shaw: I was doing things you shouldn't do,

but I didn't know who to follow, I didn't know who to copy.

And until many, many months later,

after I'd been playing months, in those days was equivalent to years,

as I was in a hurry.

And finally I heard bix, and trumbauer, and I,

there's-that's-- those are the guys.

Being a white guy, I was subjected to white music,

and I heard bix and trumbauer, and they were the exemplars.

And they played like they knew where they were going,

there was a direction to what they did,

there was a definition, a kind of discipline to what they did.

And I thought, "oh, boy, that's the way to go."

Narrator: Eager to be accepted by audiences everywhere,

and "ashamed of being a Jew," he said,

Arthur Jacob arshawsky changed his name to Artie Shaw.

Eventually he went to Harlem

to learn from Duke Ellington's mentor Willie "the lion" Smith,

who gave him the nickname "snow white."

The disciplined, self-conscious outsider was finding his voice.

[Mississippi mudPlaying]

Man, voice-over: One thing we talked about a lot was the freedom of jazz.

People used to ask bix to play a chorus

just as he had recorded it.

He couldn't do it.

"It's impossible," he told me once.

"I don't feel the same way twice."

He said, "that's one of the things I like about jazz, kid.

"I don't know what's going to happen next.

Do you?"

Jimmy mcpartland

[just an hour of lov Playing]

Narrator: In 1927, Jean goldkette's orchestra disbanded,

leaving bix beiderbecke and his friend Frankie trumbauer

on their own.

Then, they heard from Paul whiteman,

the leader of the best paid,

most successful band in the country.

Whiteman was eager to hire the best hot players

to spice up his sound.

He wanted, but did not dare hire black musicians,

so he sought out the best white ones.

Giddins: By 1926, 1927,

jazz became a very powerful music, and whiteman knew it.

He got the best white musicians in the world,

bix beiderbecke, frank trumbauer, Eddie lang,

and Joe venuti were in the band.

So, for two or 3 years, whiteman,

though never really a jazz person,

did make some very good jazz records.

Narrator: Bix loved performing in the whiteman band

and wrote home to his parents in Davenport to tell them

that he had gotten a job

with the best-known orchestra in america.

Sudhalter: His letters home were,

almost to the end of his life,

full of the kind of subtext,

which is in its truest sense an entreaty.

Respect me. Approve of me.

Look, I'm playing with

the top band in the country.

I'm making all these records.

We're playing at fancy dress balls.

Can't you be proud of me for that?

His mother was, I think, fairly sympathetic.

His father never yielded.

[Ain't no sweet man worth The salt of my tearsPlaying]

Narrator: In the summer of 1928,

the whiteman orchestra played the Chicago theater.

Sitting in the segregated balcony, Louis Armstrong,

who years before had inspired the young beiderbecke,

saw him play on stage for the first time.

"Those pretty notes went right through me,"

Armstrong remembered,

and several days that week,

in the early morning hours, at a south side club,

bix got a chance to play with the man he most admired.

"We would lock the doors," Armstrong recalled,

"and just blow."

"We tried to see how good we could make the music sound."

But bix beiderbecke would never get the chance

to record or to play in public with Louis Armstrong.

Even at the height of the jazz age,

the music world remained strictly segregated.

Jefferson: I think, my god, this poor man!

He should have been playing with one of the black orchestras.

And I believe it harmed him.

In that way he was a victim artistically.

Let's leave emotions aside.

Emotionally, he was victim of many things,

but he was a victim, artistically, of segregation.

He was not allowed to play with musicians who were as good as

and in some cases, better than he.

That's what jazz musicians need.

Marsalis: Bix beiderbecke's tragedy is an American tragedy.

It's about the white man who understands how far our culture is,

and our society is, from what it should be.

And this music has given him a glimpse of what is.

This is a man whose hearing is so deep into the meaning of this music,

that it broke his heart.

[Waiting at the end Of the roaPlaying]G

narrator: On November 30, 1928,

bix beiderbecke checked into the palace hotel in Cleveland

with the rest of the Paul whiteman orchestra.

They were to begin a weeklong run that evening.

Bix was having more and more trouble controlling his drinking

and the depression that it seemed only to intensify.

He had been missing concerts, forgetting his cues,

hiding bottles beneath the bandstand.

Many years later, a cornetist using copies of Paul whiteman's sheet music,

discovered a notation in someone's hand,

"wake up bix."

Whiteman urged him to go home to Davenport to recuperate.

But when bix got there, he discovered in a hall closet

all the records he had proudly sent home to his parents.

They had never listened to them.

[I'm coming, virgini Playing]

Man, voice-over: He wasn't being good to himself;

his feet were swollen and dragged when he walked;

his thoughts were often muddled.

He came to the studio and sat for hours at the piano.

It hurt me all over--

in my eyes, in my brain, in my stomach, in my heart,

but I knew nothing could help him.

I suppose a guy gets closer to you when he is hurting himself

and all you can do is watch.

Eddie condon

narrator: Bix quietly checked himself into a treatment center,

managed to stay sober for a while,

then fell off the wagon again,

and was never well enough to rejoin the whiteman band.

By August of 1931,

he was living alone in a borrowed one-room apartment

in queens, New York.

Sudhalter: He died in the midst of an attack of d.T.S

in a squalid little apartment in queens at 9:30 in the evening

with nobody around to help him.

Narrator: Bix beiderbecke was not yet 29.

"Lots of cats tried to play like bix," Louis Armstrong said later.

"Ain't none of them play like him yet."

Marsalis: Louis Armstrong has a song called,

mahogany hall stomp,And you can just hear in this song,

just the dance of it that goes...

[Mahogany hall stompPlaying]

Giddins: Improvisation, of course, exists before jazz.

Beethoven was a celebrated improviser.

Bach's theme and variations are developed improvisationally,

but you can't document improvisation,

you can only document the finished work,

which exists on a score, which is written.

There's no way of taping Beethoven's improvisation and then transcribing it.

But Armstrong and jazz comes along at the same time as a technology that can document.

At first there's naturally a prejudice because it's a written culture,

we're prejudiced against an oral culture.

But Armstrong, in those 1926 and 1927 and 1928 performances,

proves, for the first time,

that an improvisation can be just as coherent, imaginative,

emotionally satisfying, and durable as a written piece of music.

Narrator: Between 1925 and 1928,

Louis Armstrong made a series of 65 recordings

under his own name.

He was paid $50 a side and never saw a dime in royalties.

But after they were released,

jazz music would never be the same again,

and generations of musicians would study them in wonder and admiration.

His bands, the hot 5 and hot 7 and savoy ballroom 5

were recording groups only,

mostly made up of New Orleans musicians

with whom he'd been playing all his life,

including Johnny dodds, Johnny St. cyr, and kid ory.

His wife lil often played the piano.

But these records were something altogether new.

Giddins: I think the most important thing that you can say about the hot 5s and the hot 7s

is that for the first time, we know that jazz is an art.

What does he bring to this music that has not previously existed?

First of all, he establishes, almost single-handedly,

that jazz is going to be a soloist's art,

not an ensemble music.

Number two, he affirms, for all time,

that a fundamental basis for this music is going to be a blues tonality,

which is going to be as fundamental to jazz

as the tempered scale is to western music.

It's the blood, it's the life of the music.

Third, and most significant,

and I think this is maybe The Great innovation in American music.

And it's the most astonishing to contemplate,

Armstrong invented, what for lack of a more specific phrase, we call swing.

He created modern time.

The music that Armstrong improvised in 1928

excites us today.

And if that's not classical music, I don't know what is.

[A weather birPlaying]

Narrator: For more than two years,

Armstrong had been headlining at a south side Chicago club:

The sunset.

It was a tough place, run by the mob,

and raided so often by the police, one musician remembered,

that he used to run for the paddy wagon as soon as it pulled up

in order to get a good seat.

Armstrong's pianist was a young musician from Pittsburgh,

Earl hines, who was an innovator in his own right.

He played what came to be called "trumpet-style" piano,

confidently spinning out complex, horn-like melodies with his right hand,

while setting a looser rhythm with his left.

He and Armstrong were rivals as well as friends.

Each spurred the other to greater heights.

Shaw: I went to Chicago, I made a pilgrimage,

I took a week off and went up to Chicago, had a little car,

and I found my way to a place called the savoy.

And I sat on a rug-covered bandstand and just waited,

and he came on.

And the first thing he played was West end blu Es.

And I heard this cascade of notes coming out of a trumpet.

No one had ever done that before.

And so I was obsessed with the idea that this was what you had to do.

Something that was your own, that had nothing to do with anybody else,

but I was influenced by him, not in terms of notes,

but in terms of the idea of doing what you are, who you are.

Narrator: On June 28, 1928,

Louis Armstrong and Earl hines went into the studio

and recorded a king Oliver tune, West end blues.

it would become one of the best-known recordings

in the history of jazz:

A perfect reflection of the country in the moments before the great depression,

and it would once and for all establish Louis Armstrong

as the first, great solo genius of the music.

Giddins: When I was 15, I bought a copy of

Louis Armstrong and Earl hines.

and I put it on, and the first track was Basin street blues ,

and I was so astounded by that that I had to take the needle off the record

and just kind of get my breath.

It took me about 6 months to get through the whole side of the record,

you know, memorizing and learning each track

before I would go on to the next one.

And there was no doubt in my mind that Armstrong was,

you know, just the greatest figure in contemporary music,

and where could he go beyond that?

And then I turned the album over after some 6 months,

and the first track is you hear that cadenza:

Bop, bop, bop, boo, dop, boo, dop...

West end blues.

marsalis: Trumpet players all throughout history,

we always played fanfares.

You know, you could start with the elephant.

The elephant goes... [Plays]

That's like a fanfare, "get out of my way. I'm coming through."

And from that you have like trumpet calls

that you've heard all the time on the Saturday movies.

[Plays fanfare]

Little things like that.

And the Beethoven Lenore overture,

you have a trumpet call like...

So you always hear the trumpet doing that.

Now, West end bl Uesgoes...

So that's like another whole concept of a fanfare.

And Armstrong goes into two different times,

and he uses the same "di di dipo be do boo boo" arpeggios.

Then he uses all the chromatic notes, and he used the sound of the blues.

It's like everything is in there,

but it's so natural, it sounds very simple.

But let me tell you, it's hard to get that d, too.

And when you hear him play this solo, just the brilliance of it,

but also how natural-- it's just like, ok,

here's West end blue Sfor you.

Giddins: I played West end blues Once for a music professor,

and I put it on the turntable, and we played it once,

and he said, "play that again."

We played it again in complete silence, and he said,

"I think that may be the most perfect 3 minutes of music I've ever heard in my life."

[West end bluePlaying]

[Man humming]