A Journey Through American Music: Free Jazz to Future Jazz

Episode 4: Morgan Freeman tells the story of jazz. After the bebop revolution in the 1940s, there came an even more challenging style: free jazz, formulated by Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s.

Jazz is one of Americas greatest gifts to world culture. In this absorbing program Oscar-winning actor and music enthusiast, Morgan Freeman, tells the story of jazz's varied and sometimes challenging post-war history.

After the musical revolution of bebop in the 1940s there came an even more challenging style, free jazz, formulated by Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s; concurrently, John Coltrane took Miles Davis's experiments with modal jazz and made them his own. Fear not, these slightly intimidating concepts are fully explained in the program by jazz musicians such as Greg Osby and Matthew Shipp.

Catch Charles Lloyd - a sax-player who led one of the most popular jazz combos in the world during the 1960s - playing with an Indian tabla player. Two more of Davis's disciples, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, are also showcased. Both played highly influential roles in developing jazz-fusion. This was a style that started to incorporate electric instruments and elements of rock. Shorter, one of the true saxophone greats, co-founded Weather Report in the 1970s; while keyboardist, Herbie Hancock sold over a million albums with his band Headhunters, and has since been sampled by many rappers.

More recently the jazz flag has been flown by an array of musicians. As examples of this diversity, we are introduced to the brilliant young pianist Brad Mehldau, and then to avowed traditionalist, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis from New Orleans, bringing us back full circle to where jazz began.

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