The companion volume towards the ten-part PBS TV series with the team responsible for

The Civil War and Baseball.

Continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed works, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns up vividly bring alive the story from the quintessential American music-jazz. Blessed in the black community of turn-of-the-century New Orleans but played right from the start by musicians of each color, jazz celebrates all People in america at their finest.

Here are the stories from the extraordinary men and about Jazz: A BRIEF HISTORY of America’s Music ladies who made the music: Louis Armstrong, the fatherless waif whose unrivaled genius helped change jazz into a soloist’s art and influenced every singer, every instrumentalist who came after him; Duke Ellington, the pampered boy of middle-class parents who transformed a complete orchestra into his personal instrument, wrote nearly two thousand parts for this, and captured even more of American life than any other composer. Bix Beiderbecke, the doomed cornet prodigy who demonstrated white music artists that they too could make an important contribution to the music; Benny Goodman, the immigrants’ boy who learned the clarinet to greatly help feed his family members, but who grew up to show a whole nation how to dance; Billie Holiday, whose distinctive style routinely changed mediocre music into great art; Charlie Parker, who helped lead a musical revolution, only to destroy himself at thirty-four; and Mls Davis, whose search for fresh methods to sound made him one of the most influential jazz musician of his era, and led him to give up jazz altogether. Buddy Bolden, Jelly Move Morton, Dizzy Gillespie, Artwork Tatum, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Artie Shaw, and Ella Fitzgerald are here; so are Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Small, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and a bunch of others.

But Jazz is more than simple biography. The annals of the music echoes the history of twentieth-century America. Jazz provided the backdrop for the giddy era that F. Scott Fitzgerald known as the Jazz Age. The irresistible pulse of big-band golf swing lifted the spirits and boosted American morale during the Great Depressive disorder and World Battle II. The virtuosic, demanding style known as bebop mirrored the stepped-up pace and dislocation that was included with peace. Through the Cold War period, jazz served being a propaganda weapon-and forged links with the burgeoning counterculture. The story of jazz includes the storyplot of American courtship and display business; the epic growth of great cities-New Orleans and Chicago, Kansas City and New York-and the struggle for civil rights and basic justice that proceeds into the brand-new millennium.

Visually stunning, with an increase of than five hundred photographs, some never before published, this book, like the music it chronicles, is an exploration-and a celebration-of the American experiment.