Streaming Video

Our Language

Ken Burns

2000

Overview

As the stock market continues to soar, jazz is everywhere in America, and now, for the first time soloists and singers take center stage, transforming the music with their distinctive voices and the unique stories they have to tell. In this episode we meet Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, whose songs ease the pains of life for millions of black Americans and help black entrepreneurs create a new recording industry around the blues; Bix Beiderbecke, the first great white jazz star, who is inspired by Louis Armstrong to dedicate his life to the music and in turn inspires others with solos of unparalleled lyric grace, only to destroy himself with alcohol at age 28; and two brilliant sons of Jewish immigrants, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, for whom jazz offers an escape from the ghetto and a chance to achieve their dreams. In New York, we follow Duke Ellington uptown to Harlem's most celebrated nightspot, the gangster-owned, whites-only Cotton Club, where he continues blending the individual voices of his band members to create harmonies no one has imagined before, then gets the break of a lifetime when radio carries his music into homes across the country, bringing him national fame. And in Chicago, where he has returned to find himself billed as 'The World's Greatest Trumpet Player,' we listen as Louis Armstrong combines the soloist's and vocalist's arts to create scat singing, then watch as he charts the future of jazz in a series of small group recordings that culminates in his masterpiece, West End Blues. Called 'the most perfect three minutes of music' ever created, Armstrong's astonishing performance lifts jazz to the level of high art, where his genius stands alone.

• Publisher: Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
• Subject: Documentary / World War I & Jazz Age (1914-1928)