Original subtitles

[Charlie Parker's Bird gets the worm playing]

Narrator: In the summer of 1939,

a 19-year-old saxophone player from Kansas City named Charlie Parker

jumped a freight train and headed for New York

ready to try the big time.

He wandered the Harlem streets,

stared up at the marquee of the savoy ballroom,

and dreamed of playing there someday.

He took a $9.00-a-week job washing dishes at a little club,

just so he could hear his idol art Tatum on the piano every night,

and he played his saxophone whenever and wherever someone would give him a chance.

One night that December, during a jam session at Dan wall's chili house

on seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th,

he did something he had never done before.

Parker discovered a new way to create a compelling solo

based not on the melody of a tune,

but on the chords underlying it.

"I came alive," Charlie Parker said.

"I could fly."

Man: I think genius ultimately is unknowable.

We're never going to really understand what makes a Mozart or a schubert

any more than we're going to understand where an Armstrong or a Parker come from.

And it's only happened relatively few times

where a musician comes along and can completely transmute the music.

Wynton marsalis: Charlie Parker--

he's got to be one of the most complex characters that ever lived--

just a genius of music.

He understood all of what was going on around him.

And he understood what they were Tryi Ngto play, and he played all of it.

[Tommy dorsey's Well git iPlaying]

Narrator: By 1940,

the great depression had finally ended.

The swing music that had kept American spirits up during the lean years

was still everywhere,

and it showed no signs of slowing down.

It blared from movie screens,

poured from 350,000 jukeboxes,

sold more than 30 million records.

But overshadowing everything

was a new European war that would eventually spread to the entire world--

a war that would kill more than 55 million people.

Although america-- for the moment-- was still at peace,

young men were now subject to the draft,

and jazz would soon be called upon to play a new role

as a symbol of democracy

in a world threatened by fascism and tyranny.

Duke Ellington continued to go his own distinctive way--

artfully manipulating his musicians

and making some of the most memorable recordings in jazz history.

Louis Armstrong toured the country with his own big band,

but now--for the first time in his life--

whenever he came in off the road,

he had a real home to go to.

Meanwhile, after hours and out of earshot

of a country still obsessed with swing,

a group of defiant young musicians got together

and began to perfect a new way of playing.

For the next several years,

working behind the scenes as world war ii raged,

they would question some of the most basic assumptions of jazz.

Their leaders were the gifted trumpet player dizzy Gillespie--

a free-spirited virtuoso performer--

and the man he called "the other half of my heartbeat"--

his friend Charlie Parker,

whose revolutionary style

would alter the way a whole generation of soloists played on every instrument,

just as Louis Armstrong had done a quarter of a century earlier.

By the time the war finally ended,

the country and its most distinctive music

would never be the same again.

[Dizzy Gillespie, thelonious monk, and Kenny Clarke playing Kerouac]

man: It's been a long time now,

and not many remember how it was in the old days, not really--

not even those who were there to see and hear it as it happened

and who shared, night after night,

the mysterious spell created by the talk, the laughter,

greasepaint, powder, perfume, sweat, alcohol, and food--

all blended and simmering

like a stew on the restaurant range...

And brought to a sustained moment of elusive meaning

by the timbres and accents of musical instruments at minton's playhouse.

It was an exceptional moment,

and the world was swinging with change.

Ralph Ellison.

Narrator: In 1940,

as Hitler's armies continued their relentless drive across Europe,

a cramped and dingy club called minton's playhouse

on 118th street in Harlem

began to attract some of the most adventurous and dissatisfied musicians in jazz.

Minton's was managed by an ex-bandleader named Teddy hill

who came up with the idea of serving free food and drinks on Monday night

for any musician willing to come in and jam--

free from the regimentation of the swing bands.

"Many a big-time commercial sideman

likes to get away from all the phony music he plays for a living,"

one musician said.

"When you're playing for yourself,

you discover the really good ideas that are inside of you."

Soon, minton's got an underground reputation

as the hippest place in town.

The house band included two brilliant young innovators:

The pianist thelonious monk

and the drummer Kenny Clarke,

who spurred on soloists with astonishing kicks and accents

and cues of his own invention.

Jimmy Cobb: So he started to play accents with the bass drum and his left hand

while playing the cymbal beat with his right hand on the cymbal.

You know, like ding-ticka-ding-digga-ding

tuh-gomp-de-bomp tuh-gomp-de-bomp.

Like that instead of...

[Thump thump thump thump]

Through the whole thing.

Narrator: Coleman Hawkins,

chu Berry,

Charlie Christian,

Don byas,

milt hinton,

and Mary Lou Williams

were all regulars

at sessions that sometimes went on till dawn.

Saxophonists Lester young and Ben Webster

"used to tie up in battle" when they came to minton's.

"Like dogs in the road," the bartender remembered,

"they'd fight on those saxophones until they were tired out.

Then they'd call their mothers and tell them about it."

[Dizzy Gillespie and Roy eldridge playing I've found a new baby]

the great trumpet player Roy eldridge was often there, too--

short, fiery,

and always on the lookout for anyone who dared try to best him.

Giddins: Roy eldridge had an extremely personal sound.

In some ways, it's almost antithetical to Armstrong's.

Armstrong's is... It's brilliant. It's golden.

It's, um... It's all the fullness of life.

Roy eldridge's sound has a very human quality to it.

There's a cry in it. There's a roughness. There's an edge.

You feel like it's him speaking, at times.

It seems to come from right inside his belly and work out,

and you can hear all of the effort that goes into it.

Narrator: It was at minton's one evening that eldridge himself was unexpectedly cut

by one of his most ardent admirers...

John birks Gillespie.

There's one guy that I remember

that came on the stand and played,

and when he played, I looked up,

and he was different.

That was dizzy Gillespie.

[Gillespie and eldridge play Sometimes I'm happy]

narrator: He was born in cheraw, south Carolina--

the son of a bricklayer who beat him every Sunday morning,

whether or not he'd done anything wrong.

At the laurinburg institute--

a state technical school for blacks--

he studied piano and developed a lifelong fascination with theory and composition.

Gillespie's first jobs were with Philadelphia big bands

playing Roy eldridge-style solos

but fast, a fellow musician said,

"like a rabbit running over a hill.

Any key--it didn't make any difference."

When I first heard dizzy Gillespie, I just said,

"well, there's no sense in even listening to him

because you know nobody will ever play like him."

He just extended the range again.

He played with such rhythmic sophistication.

He created another whole way of playing the trumpet.

Generally, the trumpet players will play a rhythm like...

The syncopation would be like...

[Plays melodic lines]

Now, you get to dizzy, he's playing riffs like...

[Plays fast runs]

I mean, what is that?

[Blue n' boogiPlaying]

Narrator: Gillespie was experimenting with the music--

playing chord changes,

inverting them,

and substituting different notes he remembered--

trying to see how different sounds led naturally,

sometimes surprisingly, into others.

He was excitable and unpredictable on the bandstand--

sometimes standing up and dancing when others soloed.

His fellow musicians didn't know, he said,

"if I was coming by land or sea"...

And they began to call him "dizzy."

Man: There was a great irony in that name

because in strictly musical terms,

nobody in dizzy's generation

was more intellectual, was more, uh...

Whose approach to music was more intellectual than dizzy.

Dizzy was one of the best teachers in that generation,

and that's what he did.

He taught people.

Anytime you asked him, he'd go to the board and show you.

He'd go to the piano and show you.

[Cab Calloway's band playing Blue interlude]

narrator: In 1937,

Gillespie went to New York.

Cab Calloway: ♪ I love you so ♪

♪ want you to know ♪

♪ each hour I'm not with you is a blue interlude ♪

♪ you're part of me... ♪

Narrator: Eventually,

the hugely popular entertainer cab Calloway

hired him for his band

and then found him more than he'd bargained for.

Calloway: ♪ a blue interlude ♪

Hinton: Dizzy used to drive cab Calloway crazy...

Calloway: ♪ I never realized I needed you so badly ♪

And we'd get on the stage, and cab would be singing a ballad,

♪ I love you, my dear... ♪

And dizzy would act like he'd look out in the audience and see somebody that he knew

and wave at them,

and the people in the audience just started laughing, and cab was singing a love song,

and when he looks around to see what's happening,

he sees that like we're all in church.

Narrator: Calloway wasn't pleased with Gillespie's antics

and hated the musical liberties Gillespie took on the bandstand.

He dismissed the new playing as "Chinese music"

and barred it from his orchestra.

[Gillespie and Parker play Dizzy atmosphere]

Gillespie didn't mind

because at minton's--

far away from the commercial world of swing--

he was free to experiment with frantic tempos,

fresh harmonies, unfamiliar keys--

free to solo the way he wanted.

Only the most talented and inventive were able to keep up with Gillespie,

and those who held their own

took justifiable pride in their achievement.

[Parker quintet playing Scrapple from the apple]

then, in 1940,

word began to spread about a new alto saxophone player from Kansas City.

It was Charlie Parker.

"He was playing stuff we'd never heard before," Kenny Clarke recalled.

"He was running the same way we were,

but he was way out ahead of us."

"He had just what we needed," Gillespie said.

"We heard him and knew the music had to go his way."

Kenny Clarke had invented a new drum style, right?

There was another way you could play the drums, right?

Dizzy Gillespie and thelonious monk had worked out

these other ways of playing the chords.

They told the bass player how to walk the notes

that would fit the way they wanted it to go, see,

but they didn't have the phrasing.

See, they had everything but the phrasing,

and Charlie Parker brought the mortar, see.

They had the bricks.

They had the bricks, but he brought the mortar.

His phrasing was what made the bricks hold together.

See, before he got there, they were just interesting bricks.

When he came...

When he put that rhythm that he brought from Kansas City and out of his imagination in

and he locked it in together,

because dizzy said that he said,

"when we heard him-- when we heard his phrasing--

we knew the music had to go Hi Sway."

Narrator: Charles Parker, Jr. was born in 1920

and raised in Kansas City, Missouri.

[Parker's Now's the time Playing]

His father was a tap-dancer-turned-Pullman-chef

who drank too much and deserted his wife before his son was 11.

His mother Addie bought him a saxophone at 13,

and he began to haunt the bars that flourished just a few blocks from his home--

trying to sound like the altoist buster Smith,

who was a master of what was called "doubling up"--

playing solos at twice the written tempo.

Murray: But to appreciate his music,

it's absolutely essential to remember that he was a Kansas City musician.

Therefore, he's a blues musician,

and one of the things that impressed the older masters about him--

like Coleman Hawkins and Roy eldridge and all the musicians--

is that he could play the blues like nobody else.

Narrator: At 15,

he left school for good and joined a local band,

but Parker also began to drink,

to use marijuana,

then benzedrine dissolved in cups of black coffee

that allowed him to play without sleep night after night.

He married at 16,

was a father at 17,

and spent every spare moment furiously practicing

and listening over and over again to the records of chu Berry and Lester young.

[Parker's Meandering Playing]

On Thanksgiving day 1936,

Parker was in a terrible car crash.

His ribs were broken,

his spine fractured,

his best friend killed.

Parker spent two months recuperating in bed--

easing his pain and his anguish and sorrow

with regular doses of morphine.

Giddins: He seems to have completely changed at that point.

He became remote, difficult to communicate with--

both with his young wife, with friends, with his mother Addie--

and he seemed older.

Narrator: One day,

his wife came home to find him injecting himself with a needle.

Charlie Parker was barely 17

and already hooked on heroin.

He stayed away from home for weeks at a time,

sold his wife's belongings,

finally persuaded her to give him a divorce.

"If I were free," he told her,

"I think I could be a great musician."

It was then that Parker made his first trip to New York,

and it was there, at Dan wall's chili house,

that he had his remarkable musical revelation.

[Parker's Cherok Eeplaying]

Giddins: Charlie barnet, who was a very successful bandleader,

had a big hit record with a tune by ray noble called Cherokee,

and Parker was fascinated by the changes, the chords, the harmonies,

and he played it over and over and over again...

And it was while playing Cherokee That he came, as he said,

to his great discovery.

Parker figured out that he could play any note--

any note in the scale--

and that he could resolve it within the chord

so that it would sound harmonically right.

This was the great discovery. He said, "I came alive."

It meant that he could really fly.

He could fly right out of the conventional chord changes,

and he could make it work.

He could make it bluesy. He could make it swinging.

And so it brought everybody alive

because he was basically wiping the slate clear of all the cliches of the swing era

and providing a whole melodic and harmonic content that was completely new in jazz.

[Jay mcshann band playing Swingmatism]

narrator: Parker returned to Kansas City

and for the next two years

played in the big band led by the blues master Jay mcshann,

astounding everyone with what he had learned in New York.

Parker was playing like no one else now--

soaring so inventively on the saxophone

that the band sometimes couldn't follow him.

So fast, one listener remembered,

he sounded "like a machine."

[Mcshann octet playing I found a new baby]

Older saxophone players,

put off by his impassive look

and his unwillingness ever to play to the crowd,

called him "Indian,"

but it was with mcshann's band

that he got his distinctive nickname "bird."

Word of Parker's genius was spreading fast,

and when musicians visited Kansas City,

they all made it a point to go and hear him.

Crouch: Charlie Parker put another kind of complexity in the music.

He didn't have that big, creamy alto saxophone sound

that you get from Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter, Willie Smith, those kind of players.

His sound was hard.

It was a brittle sound.

You know, it was a sound that was, as they would say,

devoid of pity.

[Ellington's Jump for joy Playing]

Narrator: In July of 1941,

the summer before america would be drawn into the second world war,

Duke Ellington and his orchestra

came to rest momentarily

in Hollywood.

They were working on something altogether new:

An all-black musical called

jump for joy.

there was to be no shuffling,

no dialect,

no blackface comedy.

It was meant to honor black america's contribution to the country.

"I contend," Ellington told an interviewer,

"that the negro is the creative voice of america--

"icreative america--

and it was a happy day when the first unhappy slave was landed on its shores."

The show opened to rave reviews.

Ivie Anderson: ♪ fare thee well, land of cotton, cotton... ♪

Narrator: "In Jump for joy," Said the Los Angeles tribune,

"uncle Tom is dead. God rest his bones."

Those who were in the cast

never forgot its liberating power.

"Everything," one dancer recalled,

"every setting, every note of music, every lyric Mean Tsomething."

But Jump for joy Ran only 11 weeks

and never made it to Broadway.

The country wasn't ready for a show about civil rights.

[Siren]

Its attention was now focused elsewhere.

Franklin d. Roosevelt: December 7, 1941--

a date which will live in infamy--

the United States of America...

Narrator: On December 7, 1941,

america found itself forced to defend freedom

in nearly every corner of the globe.

Jazz would go to war, too.

And swing--

still america's most popular music--

helped to remind the men and women of the armed forces of home.

[Glenn Miller's In the mood Playing]

"Bandsmen today are not just jazz musicians," said Downbea Tmagazine,

"they are soldiers of music."

Giddins: I think the swing era

and all of those great bandleaders of that period

reminded Americans--

at a time when they were willing to be reminded of what was unique about the country--

of what a democracy was.

It's no accident that Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw were Jewish

or that count basie and Duke Ellington and jimmie lunceford were black

and that white audiences were responding to...

The whole country was making a hero out of Benny Goodman.

Well, this was a big thing at that moment,

and it reminded everybody that there was something special about this country,

and when the war started, it became even more underscored

because the war, in a sense, was about, you know, ethnic cleansing,

and jazz became identified...

It epitomized the American spirit--

the spirit of freedom and swing--

and, you know, we are a young, vibrant nation.

The way we dance represents us.

The way we listen to music represents us.

This was purely and uniquely American.

Narrator: But on the home front,

the music industry faced daunting new obstacles.

Blackouts darkened nightclubs and dance halls.

Late-night curfews and new cabaret and entertainment taxes--

as much as 30%--

kept still more customers at home.

The rationing of rubber and gasoline drove band buses off the roads,

and servicemen now filled the Pullman trains,

making it difficult for musicians to get around by rail.

A shortage of shellac curtailed recordings,

and companies stopped making jukeboxes and musical instruments altogether

for a time

because they were deemed unnecessary to the war effort.

The country needed weapons now.

The draft stole away good musicians

and forced bandleaders to pay their replacements more for less talent.

"I'm paying some kid trumpet player $500 a week," Tommy dorsey complained,

"and he can't even blow his nose."

But swing endured,

and its irresistible tunes

became the anthems of wartime america.

[Machine gun fire]

[Gene krupa's Drum boogie Playing]

Man: Swing's the kind of stuff we go for.

It's great morale music.

On our trip to the pacific, some of my shipmates had musical instruments.

Every day, they used to get together in a jam session.

That's all they played. That's all they wanted to hear.

And when my brother got back from 26 missions over Japan,

do you know what he wanted to hear?

Drum boogie.

Men: ♪ boogie! ♪

Anita o'day: ♪ do you hear the rhythm rompin'? ♪

♪ You see the drummer stompin'? ♪

♪ Drum boogie, drum boogie ♪

♪ boogie! ♪

♪ It really is a killer ♪

♪ drum boogie, drum boogie ♪

♪ the drum boogie-woogie ♪

Narrator: At one point during the fighting,

there were 39 bandleaders enlisted in the army,

17 in the Navy,

3 in the merchant marine,

and 2 more in the coast guard.

Glenn Miller,

whose infectious swing hits like In the mood

epitomized the war years,

disbanded his own hugely successful orchestra

to form an all-star air force unit

and perished when his airplane disappeared

over the English channel.

Benny Goodman,

still the king of swing,

was deferred because of a back injury,

but he and many other musicians volunteered for the u.S.O.

And made special "v discs" for the men and women stationed overseas.

Artie Shaw led a Navy band that toured the south pacific,

playing in jungles so hot and humid

that the pads on the saxophones rotted

and horns had to be held together with rubber bands.

17 times they were bombed or strafed by Japanese planes.

There were times when it was really very moving.

You'd play three notes,

and they instantly...

The whole audience was instantly roaring with you.

They heard... They knew the record,

and you got the feeling that you'd created a piece of durable americana

that was speaking to these people.

[Shaw's Begin the beguine Playing]

I remember an engagement on the U.S.S. Saratoga--

this huge carrier--

and we were put on the flight deck,

and we came down into this cavernous place where they...

3,000 men in dress uniforms.

And a roar went up.

[Crowd cheering]

I tell you, you know, it really threw me.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing or hearing.

I felt something extraordinary.

I was, by that time, inured to success and applause and all that

that you'd take that for granted after a while.

You could put your finger out and say, "now they're going to clap,"

but this was a whole different thing.

These men were starved

for something to remind them of home and whatever is mom and apple pie,

and the music had that effect, I suppose.

[Ellington's I let a song go out Of my heart Playing]

Crouch: If you know the person who makes

the best lemon meringue pie on the eastern seaboard,

now, you can get everybody and their mama in the kitchen

and they can show them, "this is what I do, right?"

And sit down and they'll all... They're not going to get it.

It's going to be something that they don't get,

and so the best thing to do is you say,

"ok. Now we know what the ingredients are,

"but they don't tell us anything,

so the best thing to do is just appreciate it."

Just cut you a piece of it and eat it.

Duke Ellington's like that.

Giddins: Everything comes together for Ellington in the early 1940s.

He has a contract at rca

which basically gives him carte blanche to record what he wants to record.

No longer are they going to throw different pop tunes at him

and tell him that this has got, you know,

he's got to do these kinds of hits,

so now Ellington-- he wants hits himself, you know?

Everything goes right.

Every time he walks into the recording studio-- another masterwork,

and not just masterworks, but popular.

Announcer: Well, friends, at the beginning of our broadcast,

we asked you to buy that extra bond,

and here's Duke Ellington to tell you why.

Ellington: Friends, every bond you buy...

Narrator: Duke Ellington was 42 years old when the war began--

too old for the army,

but he did all that he could for the cause,

including acting as host of a weekly radio program that sold war bonds:

Your Saturday date With the Duke.

[Ellington's The kissing bug Playing]

Ivie Anderson: ♪ you say that i'm the one you love ♪

♪ you swear by every star above ♪

♪ and then you kiss some other miss ♪

♪ you're nothin' but a kissin' bug ♪

♪ kissin' bug ♪

Narrator: Ellington's popularity was never greater,

and his music had never been more rich,

in part because of a new addition to his band.

Just before the war broke out,

Ellington was on tour in Pittsburgh.

There he was introduced to a local pianist named Billy strayhorn.

He was just 23 years old,

small and bespectacled,

and still supporting himself as a drugstore clerk

while he looked for music work at night,

but he played Ellington's standard Sophisticated lady

with such flair and originality

and had already written such interesting tunes of his own

that Ellington asked him to come see him when he got back to New York.

[Ellingtonplayingg Take the "a" train ]

when the two men next met,

strayhorn had written and arranged a brand-new song

based on Ellington's directions on how to get to his apartment in Harlem by subway.

Take the "a" tra Iwas a hit

and quickly became Ellington's theme,

and strayhorn would become his lifelong collaborator.

They were very different.

Strayhorn was warm, gregarious, homosexual.

Ellington was private, enigmatic, and a ladies' man,

but both were dedicated to the same all-consuming goal:

The greatness of the Duke Ellington orchestra,

of Duke Ellington's music,

and of Duke Ellington himself.

Ellington called strayhorn

"my right arm, my left arm,

"all the eyes in the back of my head.

"My brain waves are in his head,

and his in mine."

Woman: There were maybe two people that Duke Ellington valued above all others.

I believe that one of them was his mother,

and the other one was Billy strayhorn.

You must know that they loved each other.

Basically, I think,

the joy of them finding each other

was the core of their mutual creativity.

They brought out the best in each other.

It was like a musical marriage.

I've never really seen two people connect so well together

as Duke and Billy.

They really dressed each other,

and they became so close that Billy could really read Duke's musical thoughts,

and Duke could read Billy's musical thoughts.

I may be somewhere like in Los Angeles, and he's in New York,

and I get to the 17th bar of a number, and I decide,

well, I think rather than sit here and struggle with this

I'll call strays,

and I'll call him and say,

"look, I'm in e-flat or someplace

"and, uh, the mood is this,

"and, you know, this man is supposed to be walking up the road,

"and he reaches a certain intersection, and I can't decide

whether he should turn left, right, go straight ahead or make a u-turn,"

and he says, "oh, yes, I know what you mean," you know?

And, um, "well, I think you could do that better than I could."

That's his first response, you know?

But all the time, he's thinking about how he can outdo me, you know?

And then, uh...And very often, without any more than that,

we come up with practically the same thing.

Giddins: In a very short time, he became his alter ego.

He became the guy he could deputize to conduct the band,

to sit in at the piano if he was conducting,

and most important, to fill up the book

not only with original arrangements and compositions--

because strayhorn then proved to be maybe the second greatest composer in jazz in that era

after Ellington--

but also to work so closely together on collaborative pieces,

on suites and longer works and even shorter works

where you can't tell whose hand is, you know, leading who.

[Ellington's Daydrea Mplaying]

Narrator: For almost 3 decades,

Ellington and strayhorn would work together

to make a great orchestra still greater.

Mercedes Ellington: It was very private.

I think that only the two of them knew what their relationship was like.

Up to the point of meeting Billy strayhorn,

I think that my grandfather was a very lonely person

on the musical level.

There was no one he could communicate to on that level,

and if you can imagine:

What if Mozart had somebody like that?

It would be such an opening.

It would be such a joy

to be able to not necessarily say something

but just write a note and have somebody else write a note,

and you write a note, and then it's all the same thing.

It's like communicating with just feelings.

[Rumbling]

Man: Jazz expresses the hope of a free people

who hunger for a better life.

It is based on individuality,

which is contrary to the very fundamentals of nazism.

Earl hines.

Narrator: By the end of 1941,

the Germans had overrun most of Europe:

Czechoslovakia,

Poland,

Belgium,

Holland,

Denmark,

Norway,

and France.

Devastating air strikes threatened britain, as well.

[Fire alarm rings]

[Benny Goodman playing Makin' whoopee]

but despite their domination of Europe,

the Nazis had failed to crush jazz--

the music that propaganda minister Joseph goebbels had once called

"the art of the sub-human."

It flourished underground--

a bright symbol of resistance.

In Germany itself,

young fans called "swing kids" defied the gestapo

to meet in secret, play records, tune in allied radio, and dance.

In 1942, the Nazis changed tactics.

Goebbels ordered the propaganda ministry to organize its own radio swing band

and aim its broadcasts of familiar American tunes

with new, poisonous, anti-semitic lyrics

at the allies.

♪ Another war ♪

♪ another profit ♪

♪ another Jewish business trick ♪

♪ another season ♪

♪another reason ♪

♪ for makin' whoopee ♪

♪ we throw our German names away ♪

♪ we are the kikes of u.S.A. ♪

♪ You are the goys, folks ♪

♪ we are the boys, folks ♪

♪ we're makin' whoopee ♪

Narrator: To divert attention from their hideous crimes,

the Nazis eventually made a propaganda film

intended to demonstrate to the world

their supposed kindness to the Jews.

The infamous terezin concentration camp outside Prague

was dressed up as a model village,

and its occupants were given new clothes.

They were then photographed being entertained by inmate musicians,

including a jazz band called the ghetto swingers.

[Train whistle]

Once the filming was over,

the musicians' reward was to be sent to the death camp at Auschwitz

along with hundreds of thousands of other innocent people.

[Parker's Bird of paradise Playing]

Ellison: Charlie Parker stretched the limits of human contradiction

beyond belief.

He was lovable and hateful,

considerate and callous.

He stole from friends and benefactors

and borrowed without conscience

and yet was generous to absurdity.

He could be most kind to younger musicians

or utterly crushing in his contempt for their ineptitude.

He was passive, yet quick to pull a knife and pick a fight.

He was given to extremes of sadness and masochism--

capable of the most staggering excesses

and the most exacting physical discipline and assertion of will.

Ralph Ellison.

[Mcshann octet playing Oh! Lady be good]

mcshann: You know, we used to have a expression when the cat's blowing out there.

A lot of times bird be blowing

and cats holler, "reach, reach."

What we meant by that--

we knew that the cat knows his potential--

what he can do.

If you keep hitting on bird like that,

"reach, reach,"

bird will just do the impossible.

And he was that type of person.

He would do the impossible. You'd make him do the impossible,

and that's the reason the cats would do that, you know,

and...see, because he always had enough stored back here

that he never did run out.

Narrator: In late 1942,

as American forces fought German troops for the first time in north Africa,

Charlie Parker,

deferred from the army because of his drug addiction,

left mcshann and joined Earl hines' big band.

The group was full of young revolutionaries

who wanted to push the boundaries of the music

including Sarah Vaughn,

Billy eckstine,

and dizzy Gillespie.

It was Gillespie who had convinced hines to hire Parker,

but all of Parker's habits came with him.

Crouch: One guy told me that when Parker was in the Earl hines band,

he came, and he gave this pin to this guy, right?

And he told the guy to put it inside his jacket.

He said, "what is this for?"

He said, "when I nod off and it's time for me to solo,"

he said, "just stick me in the leg with this pin." Right?

Somebody else gets tapped on the shoulder, maybe, right?

So, he begins his entrance with the pain of this pin being stuck in his leg.

That's the way he starts to come in to play.

[Parker and Gillespie jamming Sweet Georgia brown]

narrator: But it was in the hines band

that Charlie Parker and dizzy Gillespie were finally able to play together

every night.

"Out on the road, things started happening between Charlie Parker and me,"

Gillespie remembered.

"We were together all the time--

playing in hotel rooms and jamming."

Jackie mclean: They would practice together

and work out these ideas,

and I think that they wanted to play something that the older musicians couldn't play.

I think they wanted to get up on the stage

and play ideas in keys and on chord progressions

that would be difficult for other musicians to stand up and play.

Narrator: Their combined talents released so much musical energy--

"fire," one musician called it--

that others simply got left behind.

But Parker and Gillespie's innovations went mostly unheard.

The American federation of musicians

had ordered its members to stop making records

until the record companies agreed to pay them

each time their music was played in jukeboxes or on the radio.

Record companies refused.

It would be more than two years before the issue was fully settled

and musicians could return to the studios.

And so, except for a handful of musicians

and a few devoted fans,

Charlie Parker and dizzy Gillespie's new way of playing

remained a secret.

[Josh white's Uncle Sam says Playing]

Josh white: ♪ well, airplanes flyin' 'cross the land and sea ♪

♪ everybody flying but a negro like me ♪

♪ uncle Sam says, "your place is on the ground" ♪

♪ "when I fly my airplanes" ♪

♪ "don't want no negro 'round" ♪

Man: Though I have found no negroes

who want to see the United Nations lose this war,

I have found many who, before the war ends,

want to see the stuffing knocked out of white supremacy.

American negroes are confronted not with a choice, but with a challenge

both to win democracy for ourselves at home

and to help win the war for democracy the world over.

A. Phillip Randolph.

Narrator: In 1941,

a. Phillip Randolph,

president of the brotherhood of sleeping car porters,

threatened to lead a mass march on Washington

unless Franklin Roosevelt opened up jobs in the defense industries

which had been closed to blacks.

Roosevelt agreed,

but not even Randolph could talk the president into integrating the armed forces.

A million African-Americans would serve--

nearly half a million overseas--

all on a basis of strict segregation.

Even blood supplies for saving the lives of the wounded

were carefully separated by race.

During the war years, there were bloody confrontations

between black and white troops at military installations all across the country.

Off base, black soldiers were harassed, beaten,

barred from buses and even from restaurants where German prisoners of war

were allowed to eat.

And a new, great black migration from the south

in search of defense work led to violent conflicts over jobs and housing

in 47 cities in the summer of 1943.

African-Americans grew increasingly impatient

with the hypocrisy of fighting bigotry abroad...

While tolerating it at home.

No one felt more alienated than young black jazz musicians

like Charlie Parker and dizzy Gillespie.

They seemed to be special targets of white policemen

and white servicemen who objected to their being well-dressed,

their hipster language, their new assertiveness.

Black musicians began to call one another "man,"

in part because they were so often called "boy."

Josh white: ♪ got my long government letters ♪

♪ my time to go ♪

♪ when I got to the army, found the Sam old Jim crow ♪

♪ uncle Sam says ♪

♪ two camps for black and white ♪

♪ but when trouble starts ♪

♪ we'll all be in that same big fight ♪

♪ if you ask me, I think democracy is fine ♪

♪ I mean democracy without the color line ♪

♪ uncle Sam says, "we'll live the American way" ♪

Louis Armstrong: ♪ when the sun sets in the sky ♪

♪ flowers never die ♪

♪ friends don't pass you by ♪

♪ for that's my home ♪

♪ when the folks say howdy do ♪

♪ like they mean it, too ♪

♪ where mama's love is true ♪

♪ 'cause that's my home ♪

Narrator: Louis Armstrong was 40 years old when the war began,

and, like Duke Ellington, too old for the army.

But he did what he could,

playing segregated army camps and Navy training stations

and visiting military hospitals

where black and white wounded alike begged him to sign their casts "satchmo."

He still spent most of his time on the road.

Armstrong was happily married now

to an ex-dancer named Lucille Wilson.

Shortly after their wedding,

she bought a house in a working-class neighborhood in queens.

When his tour ended and Armstrong's taxi

pulled up to the front door of his new house,

he couldn't believe it was his.

"I rang the bell," he remembered,

"and sure enough, the door opened,

"and who stood in the doorway

with a real thin silk nightgown?"

For the rest of his life, Lucille Wilson Armstrong

would provide him with the stable home he'd yearned for

since his boyhood on the streets of New Orleans.

Man: I listen not so much to the timbre of the voice,

but to the feeling.

It was something that went deep inside.

For instance, when he would do a tune like That's my home,

Louis said, "I'm always welcome back, no matter where I roam,

just an old sweet shack, we call it home, sweet home."

But he could do that so much that, so help me,

I'd have to fight back the tears.

Now, every night, we'd do that,

and just certain things he did that had such--

such artistic-- and emotion. Emotion.

It was, uh...

It was much more than just a great singer.

Armstrong: ♪ ...Pass you by ♪

♪ for that's my home ♪

Shaw: He didn't have a great voice,

but his heart and his soul,

he was a giant.

Armstrong: ♪ like they mean it, too ♪

♪ where mama's love is true ♪

♪ 'cause that's my home ♪

[Applause]

[Artie Shaw's band playing Summertime]

man: In the late twenties and the very early thirties,

novelists, poets, newspaper columnists, and publishers

combined to portray Harlem as negro heaven.

It's time now for Harlem to quit kidding itself.

Harlem never has lived up to its reputation.

Harlem is, and has been for years, in a bad way.

It has refused to face facts.

But it seems that sham can no longer go on.

Amsterdam News.

narrator: On April 21, 1943,

the doors of Harlem's best-loved ballroom, the savoy, were padlocked.

Both city and military authorities claimed that armed forces personnel

had contracted venereal diseases from the women they met there.

The real reason, angry Harlem residents charged,

was that blacks and whites had not just danced together at the savoy,

but had gone home together.

Hitler has scored a Jim crow victory in New York.

The reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. told his congregation,

closing down the savoy was "the first step toward segregation" of the city.

There were race riots over jobs and housing

all across the north that summer.

And in August, as allied bombers pounded German cities,

violence came to Harlem, too.

[Siren]

6 were killed, 700 injured,

and nearly 1,500 mostly white-owned shops were damaged or destroyed.

The old dreams of the Harlem renaissance were deferred again.

Harlem was beginning to get a reputation among whites

as a dangerous place--

so dangerous that many jazz fans hesitated to visit it anymore.

By this time, the living heart of jazz had already moved

to a single block of old brownstones on the West Side--

52nd street, between fifth and sixth avenues.

Musicians called it simply "the street."

I would say most people, when they first come to New York,

want to see the statue of Liberty,

which you see anyway when you come in by boat,

as you did in those days,

and the empire state building, but I wanted to see 52nd street,

which I had heard so much about.

Narrator: There were 7 cellar clubs in that one block--

Jimmy Ryan's, the onyx, the famous door,

the troc, the downbeat, the spotlight, and the three deuces.

Everybody played there, and a visitor could hear every kind of music

drifting out over the street all at once...

Traditional New Orleans jazz, swing,

even the experimental sounds

that Parker, Gillespie, and their friends had begun to make.

Man: I was just a kid,

and my brother was 3 or 4 years older,

and we would come down the West Side highway,

which had been constructed by then,

and we'd get off at 52nd street and drive.

Before we checked into a hotel, we would drive straight across town

and just drive down 52nd street.

It was the most beautiful thing. It was so exciting.

There was red Allen and higginbotham at Kelly's stables.

And here was art Tatum at the three deuces

and count basie at the famous door.

And it was like being in a candied heaven,

and the candy was the jazz that you could grab hold of.

And that night, we would take, like, $10 or $15 that my father had given us to go out.

We'd go to 5 clubs.

It was just the greatest feeling that one could have,

and you never forgot that feeling,

because as you sat in those clubs, particularly at 3:00 in the morning--

I was half-asleep, but I wasn't asleep.

And you felt that musicians were playing for you.

Narrator: The street was a favorite haunt of servicemen on leave.

But the volatile mix of alcohol and race caused constant trouble.

White soldiers and sailors from the south were enraged

by the sight of so many well-dressed black musicians.

Dizzy Gillespie was once attacked

simply for walking with a light-skinned black woman.

And in the near-riot that followed,

he escaped with his life by hiding in the subway.

The unofficial queen of 52nd street was Billie Holiday.

"Working on the street seemed like a homecoming every night," she recalled.

"I was getting a little billing and publicity,

so my old friends knew where to find me."

Man: They loved her. They loved her.

As soon as she would walk on-- shh--complete silence.

I mean, it could be chaos going on in the club,

and just total silence.

She had that presence, as soon as she walked on--

that look, and you knew you had to shut up and listen.

And they did. She was fantastic.

Narrator: But her new celebrity did nothing to curtail

the toughness for which she'd been known since girlhood.

When two drunken white sailors snuffed out their cigarettes on her fur coat one night,

she told them she'd meet them outside, then beat them both senseless with her fists.

In 1941, she married a sometime marijuana dealer named Jimmy Monroe

and began smoking opium.

Then she moved in with a good-looking trumpet player named Joe guy.

He was addicted to heroin.

Soon, she would be using it, too.

"I spent the rest of the war on 52nd street," Billie Holiday said.

"I had the white gowns and the white shoes,

and every night, they'd bring me the white gardenias and the white junk."

When her mother Sadie died suddenly,

holiday felt abandoned, terrified of being alone,

and her music began to change.

The way she sang any song, like, uh, In my solitude,

anything that has that feeling,

she had a very, very lonesome--was part of her life,

and she had run into an awful lot of men

that didn't treat her very well,

and all of this-- that she had been raped when she was very young

and all that kind of stuff...

Holiday: ♪ in my solitude... ♪

Rowles: All this that was inside of lady day

came out of her with the words.

Holiday: ♪ ...Me ♪

♪ with memories ♪

♪ that never die ♪

♪ I'll sit in my chair ♪

♪ filled with despair ♪

♪ there's no one could be so sad ♪

♪ with gloom everywhere ♪

♪ I sit and I stare ♪

♪ I know that I'll soon go mad ♪

♪ in my solitude ♪

♪ I'm praying ♪

♪ the lord above ♪

♪ send back my love ♪

Man: I still play her records now.

When you saw her, it was just so different

than any other person you had seen onstage singing.

The way she would sell a song.

Her music--the way she could make a song--

anybody else could sing that song,

and when lady day sang it,

it was a different song altogether.

It just made you feel good all over,

or...she'd make you want to cry.

It would bring back the great moments in your life,

and it might bring back the saddest moments in your life.

This was Billie Holiday.

Holiday: ♪ gloom everywhere ♪

♪ I sit and I stare ♪

♪ I know that I'll soon go mad ♪

♪ in my solitude ♪

♪ I'm praying ♪

♪ dear lord above ♪

♪ send me back my love ♪

And after you've absorbed the day

and you get all settled down, you're quiet,

you're all ready to go to sleep now.

You turn out the light, and you put your head on the pillow.

And you get your sleeping stance together, and...

There's the idea you've been looking for all day long now.

And you get up and get the paper and pencil and jot it down.

And usually before you go to sleep, you got the next part of it.

Ha ha ha!

[Duke Ellington band playing Harlem airshaft]

narrator: All through the war years,

Duke Ellington kept his remarkable orchestra together

and kept them on the road, playing his utterly unique brand of swing.

Ellington himself wrote incessantly--

aboard trains and buses,

in cars roaring down the highway,

on napkins in restaurants and nightclubs,

even in the bath,

turning out masterpiece after masterpiece,

music that would rank among the greatest of all American compositions.

He claimed to have written Solitude In 20 minutes,

leaning up against a wall while waiting to get into a recording studio;

black and tan fantasy In a taxi going through central park;

and Mood ind Igoin 15 minutes while waiting for his mother to finish cooking dinner.

During its half-century on the road,

scores of musicians appeared with Ellington's orchestra,

but none was ever allowed to get too close.

"He was a miraculous Jigsaw," one friend said,

"and seldom did anyone pick up more than a few pieces at a time."

Marsalis: Well, with Duke Ellington,

you're not going to get to know him too well,

because he has a certain space that he's reserved for himself,

and he has tremendous range and great understanding.

He's a great listener. He's always listening-- and a great observer.

So you might not know it, but he's observing everything--

the way you walk, the way you say things, what you have on.

Just little mannerisms, things that you wouldn't know.

He's a great flirter,

so he's always flirting, and ladies love him

because he's such a great flirter,

but it's not just that he flirts,

it's that his flirtations are accurate,

and the best flirt is always accurate,

and he's almost always accurate because he's always observing.

So he can look at a woman, he can tell if she's a singer,

what kind of job she has, so his flirt is going to come to you--

"how did you know that, Duke?" Oh.

[Band playing Jack the bear]

narrator: Ellington focused his uncanny understanding on his men, too.

Every note he wrote was meant to be played by a specific musician,

casting his arrangements the way a director would cast a play.

He had carefully and meticulously built his band,

and it was made up of distinct individuals--

"18 maniacs," he once said.

Each had special strengths and a unique sound

Ellington cleverly exploited.

Giddins: Each of the soloists is a storyteller

and has his own personality, and all of this was very novel.

If he says that this solo is going to be by bubber Miley,

you know that it's going to have a certain quality

that it won't have if it's played by Johnny Hodges.

A cootie Williams solo is different from an Arthur whetsol solo.

That's why Ellington did not write a concerto for trumpet.

[Trumpet playing]

He wrote a Concerto for cootie.

he took the musicians, what they could do, what their personalities were,

and then he made them the centerpieces in the play, in the musical work.

Narrator: Over the years, there would be drunks and drug addicts

among Ellington's men, and at least one kleptomaniac

who raided his fellow musicians' belongings nearly every night.

They often failed to turn up on time

and sometimes had to be bailed out of jail.

Some refused to speak to one another

or even to Ellington for years.

None of that mattered much to him...

Provided they could play.

Man: Even his most loyal followers couldn't understand

how the band could be so great with such seeming lack of discipline.

They wondered how all of this inventiveness and beautiful music

could be produced as bandsmen drift on and off stage,

yawn, act bored, apparently disdaining the people, the music, and the entire scene.

Rex Stuart.

Crouch: Negro Americans are not predisposed

to follow people.

They really aren't.

See, that's why there's always a certain element of chaos

in the negro world,

because, see, I think from slavery forward,

we just didn't like--no!

So somebody telling you over and over,

you got to do this, you know, "I'm not doing that!

Just because you said that?"

Say, "yes, but it's right." "I don't care.

"So what if it's right? I ain't doing it anyway. "Why am I not doing it?

"For the same reason that dostoyevsky said I'm not going to do it.

"So I can tell you that I exist.

So I'm just going to mess your stuff up, right?"

Now, the fact that Duke Ellington

was able to get these knuckleheads to cooperate--

he would start fights between people.

He would go over to one guy and say,

"you know, so-and-so said you're not really playing."

And then he'd go to the other guy and say, "you know..."

[Muttering]

Then he would write a piece with both of them in it,

and they would be so furious at each other

that they would actually work and work and work on the piece

to make sure that they played it better than the other guy, right?

And then in the process of playing it,

they would both sound so good that that would resolve the argument.

I mean, he had two guys who got along again,

and he had a great performance.

Narrator: No member of Ellington's band ever played more beautifully--

or caused more trouble-- than his first great tenor saxophone star, Ben Webster.

"If he had a few drinks in him,"

"he was an animal."

His nickname was "the brute."

I've gone to his house with his mother in Kansas City,

and his mother was a schoolteacher.

And when he was in his mother's house,

he was like little lord fauntleroy.

We would go right around the corner and go and have a beer,

he'd knock 4 people down before we got out of the door good.

Narrator: Despite his legendary drinking and ferocious temper,

Webster was famous for the huge, virile, swaggering tone he brought to solos.

One of his best-known performances

was in an up-tempo his boss had written especially for him--

cotton tail.

[playing Cotton tail]

Ben Webster.

Giddins: Cotton tail Is one of the great jam session tunes of all times.

It's a very swinging piece, and it really kind of typifies

this state of grace that Ellington fell into in the early forties

when he couldn't record anything or write anything other than masterpieces.

And I think when people heard that for the first time,

it just--you know, it just epitomized what an exciting, energetic,

almost liberating kind of music that it was.

And so it inspired dancers.

[Band playing Black, brown and beige]

Giddins: Ellington was always trying to break out of molds,

and one of the molds that he and every other musician in the world

was forced into was that of the 3-minute recording.

And because so much of big band music

was associated with dance and pop numbers and show tunes,

people began to think of the music

as though it couldn't work beyond those limitations.

And so he moved the music beyond the 3-minute level.

He began to explore areas of the music

that no one else had really been willing to Wade into.

Narrator: On the evening of January 23, 1943,

as Soviet troops struggled to break the Nazi stranglehold on stalingrad,

Duke Ellington presented an ambitious 44-minute work

at carnegie hall.

Proceeds from the concert were to go to Russian victims

of the war.

Ellington had helped create the swing music that still gripped the country,

but now he tried to move beyond it

by writing an extended composition in 3 movements.

He called the piece Black, brown and beige--

a tone parallel to the history Of the negro in america.

man: Black, brown and beige, I think, in 1943

was the culmination of this movement

of writing about negro Americans.

Duke wanted to capture the mood of the slaves working

on the plantation, out in the fields.

The first part of Black, brown and beige Was called The work song...

and how well he captured that with the band.

You just could see this and feel it.

[The work so Playing]

And then with this, there was a religious element.

Duke wrote a second movement called Come Sunday,

which was an expression of the people on Sunday

relieved of their labors and their toils.

They had a chance to pray.

To rest, yes, but to pray and ask god to help them.

Come sundayWas an expression of a longing for liberation,

a longing for freedom.

That expression, with Juan tizol's opening statement on the valve trombone,

with ray Nance's violin and Johnny Hodges stretching up with the full melody,

that captured the religious fervor of his people.

And then the music would change.

A bright tempo. Emancipation proclamation. Joy.

They were moving around.

He expressed all the movements of the negro.

Then he began to move northward.

He began to fill in cities--

Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, New York--

and get into the full stream of urban life and living.

Sherrill: He was really fighting for freedom.

The limitations that had been put on blacks through the years

was really unacceptable.

And so he was really shouting musically, saying,

"we need to be free."

Narrator: The audience at carnegie hall that night,

which included the first lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt,

loved Black, brown and beige,

and the concert earned thousands of dollars for Russian war relief.

[Applause]

Sanders: When someone played with Duke Ellington,

I think they were aware they were with someone very special.

Here was a composer.

And his music had such quality and such richness...

That they felt privileged to play it.

I know that was my feeling.

When you are in that orchestra,

when you come to actually sit down and open up that huge library

and begin to play, then you get to meet not only the composer,

the orchestra leader, the piano player, the arranger,

but you see, you meet the man himself.

Man: Ellington always feels that he has found sanctuary when he boards a train.

He likes to hear the whistle up ahead,

particularly at night, when it screeches through the blackness

as the train gathers speed.

Frowning, his hat on the back of his head,

swaying from side to side with the motion of the car,

occasionally sucking his pencil and trying to write firmly

despite the bouncing of the train,

humming experimentally, america's latter-day bach will work through the night.

The new yorker.

The new yorker. [Explosion]

[Explosion]

[Men shouting]

[Benny Goodman banplaying Somebody stole my gal]

Man: When you get a group of musicians really playing,

and in the days of the swing bands,

it was this feeling of freedom,

and then a guy would get a solo,

and this was his expression of freedom--

a trumpet player, a trombone, or saxophones, or the pianist...

And then they were completely free,

away from the constriction of the written music,

but improvising on top of it.

And this is the thing I love the most about jazz,

it's the thing that expresses the United States.

It expresses freedom.

All over the world, jazz is accepted as the music of freedom.

It's the most--it's more important than baseball.

Narrator: Dave brubeck had been in college in stockton, California,

when america entered the war.

His father had always wanted him to become a cattleman

and help out on the family ranch.

But brubeck loved jazz and dreamed of touring with Benny Goodman's swing band.

He graduated in 1942, joined the army as a rifleman,

married a fellow student on a 3-day pass,

and shipped out to Europe in the summer of 1944,

fully expecting to go right into combat.

Brubeck: I finally ended up in Europe

3 months after d-day, fortunately,

and we went to verdun.

And they said, "you're going to have to be at the front soon,

but tonight there's going to be some girls come up and entertain you, red cross girls,

so they had a piano on the back of a truck

where the side of the truck came down and made a stage.

And they asked over their loudspeaker,

"we need a piano player. Is there a pianist that will come up and play for us?"

So nobody went up, and I finally raised my hand.

I remember I was sitting on my helmet

in a place called the mudhole,

and I went up there,

and a colonel heard me play,

and he said, "this guy shouldn't go to the front."

"We want to keep him here and form a band."

Narrator: The United States army may have been segregated,

but Dave brubeck's wolf pack band was not.

The men ate, slept, and lived together

and shared experiences they would never forget.

The band once played so close to the front lines

that German planes swooped down to strafe them,

and the whole audience rushed for their arms to shoot back.

During the battle of the bulge,

brubeck and his men got lost and found themselves deep in German territory.

It was hours before they found their way back

to the American lines.

The wolf pack remained with George patton's third army

until the war in Europe finally ended on may 8, 1945.

Through it all, the band remained integrated.

[Glenn Miller's band playing American patrol]

But when Dave brubeck and the wolf pack band got home,

nothing in america had changed.

Brubeck: When we landed in Texas,

we all went to the dining room to eat,

and they wouldn't serve the black guys.

The guys had to go around and stand at the kitchen door.

This one guy, he said he wouldn't eat any of their food,

and he started to cry, and he said,

"what I've been through, and the first day I'm back in the United States,

I can't even eat with you guys."

He said, "I wonder why I went through all this."

You know, the first black man that I saw,

my dad took me to see on the Sacramento river in California.

And he said to his friend,

"open your shirt for Dave."

There...

There was a brand on his chest.

And my dad said, "these things can't happen."

That's why I fought for what I fought for.

[Airplane engine]

[Explosion]

[Charlie Parker band playing Bird gets the worm]

mclean: I've always felt that the world around the musician

has a great influence on what he produces musically.

And with the acceleration of the technology in world war ii, you know,

the propeller plane developed into the jet plane,

and of course the atomic bomb, and everything sped up, and so did the music.

The music began to accelerate.

Narrator: On November 26, 1945,

11 weeks after the surrender of Japan,

Charlie Parker finally made his first recordings under his own name

for the independent label savoy records.

Dizzy Gillespie and a 19-year-old newcomer named miles Davis played trumpet,

and Gillespie sometimes sat in at the piano.

Curly Russell was on bass, Max roach on drums.

4 sides were cut that day: Billie's bounce,

thrivin' from a riff, Now's the time,

and a new tune built on the chord changes of Cherokee Called Ko ko.

[band playing Ko ko]

Giddins: Ko Kois one of the most extraordinary recordings in jazz history,

there's no question about it.

It was the recording that really unleashed Parker on the jazz world.

For two years before then, there was a recording ban,

so nobody around the country heard Charlie Parker.

It was explosive, out of nowhere.

The first thing you have to remember about Parker,

because you get into the musicological innovations,

is that it was shocking, the way Louis Armstrong was shocking in the 1920s.

[Saxophone playing]

Narrator: "There was a revolution going on in New York,"

one saxophone player remembered,

"a rebellion against all those blue suits we had to wear

in the big swing bands."

"It was a cult," another recalled, "a brotherhood."

"Soon," a third remembered, "there was everybody else, and there was Charlie."

And now, for the first time, the public would have a chance to hear his music.

Charlie Parker's secret was out.

Ellison: Usually, music gives resonance to memory...

But not the music ThenIn the making.

Its rhythms were out of stride and seemingly arbitrary...

Its drummers frozen-faced introverts dedicated to chaos.

And in it, the steady flow of memory, desire, and defined experience

summed up by the traditional jazz beat and blues mood

seemed swept like a great river from its old, deep bed.

We know better now and recognize the old moods in the new sounds,

but what we know is that which was then becoming.

Ralph Ellison.

[In a mellotonPlaying]