Jazz: The Gift explores the evolution and the genius of America’s greatest original art form. Not simply a chronicle of musical fact or lore, Jazz shows this remarkable music in the context of the complicated country that gave birth to it and shows how this remarkable art form became a part of world culture. Jazz raises questions about race and class, art and commerce, virtuosity and collaboration, the individual and the community, the confluence of cultures and the universality of experience.  

Jazz: The Gift introduces jazz legends like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, employing engaging and detailed portraits of the great men and women of jazz to demonstrate how and why they make their music.

Episode One
Gumbo
Beginnings to 1917
JAZZ begins in New Orleans, nineteenth century America’s most cosmopolitan city, where the sound of marching bands, Italian opera, Caribbean rhythms, and minstrel shows fill the streets with a richly diverse musical culture. Here, in the 1890s, African-American musicians create a new music out of these ingredients by mixing in ragtime syncopation's and the soulful feeling of the blues. Soon after the start of the new century, people are calling it jazz.

Tonight, meet the pioneers of this revolutionary art form: The half-mad cornetist, Buddy Bolden, who may have been the first man to play jazz; Sidney Bechet, a clarinet prodigy whose fiery sound matched his explosive personality; Freddie Keppard, a trumpet virtuoso who turned down a chance to win national fame for fear others would steal the secrets of his art.

The early jazz players travel the country in the years before World War I, but few people have a chance to hear this new music until 1917, when a group of white musicians from New Orleans arrive in New York to make the first jazz recording. They call themselves the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and within weeks their record becomes an unexpected smash hit, catapulting them to stardom. Americans are suddenly jazz crazy, and the Jazz Age is about to begin.

Episode Two
The Gift
1917-1924
Speakeasies, flappers, and easy money: it is the Jazz Age, when the story of jazz becomes a tale of two great cities, Chicago and New York, and of two extraordinary artists whose lives and music will span almost three-quarters of a century -- Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

Armstrong, a fatherless waif who grew up on the mean streets of New Orleans, develops his great gift -- his unparalleled musical genius -- with the help of King Oliver, the city’s top cornetist. In 1922, follows him to Chicago, where Armstrong’s transcendent sound and exhil-arating rhythms inspire a new generation of musicians, white and black, to join the world of jazz.

Meanwhile, Ellington, raised in middle-class comfort by parents who told him he was “blessed,” outgrows the society music he learned to play in Washington, D.C., and heads for Harlem. There he forms a band to create a music all his own -- hot, blues-drenched, and infused with the gutbucket growls of his new trumpet player, Bubber Miley.

As the Roaring Twenties accelerate, Paul Whiteman, a white bandleader, sells millions of records playing sweet, symphonic jazz, while Fletcher Henderson, a black bandleader, packs the dance floor at the whites-only Roseland Ballroom with his innovative big band arrangements. Then, in 1924, the year Whiteman introduces George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Henderson brings Louis Armstrong to New York, to add his improvisational brilliance to the band's new sound, and soon Armstrong is showing the whole world how to swing.