JAZZ
Episode Eight
Dedicated to Chaos
International Version
Draft 1 
A Film by Ken Burns
Written by Geoffrey C. Ward

TRT: 58:40

[mx: Charlie Parker Quintet “Scrapple from the Apple” 1947]

Title:
A Florentine Films Production

JAZZ

NARRATOR: During the world-wide struggle against evil overseas, swing music came to be seen everywhere as a symbol of freedom.  But at home, backstage, and at nightspots like Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, young swing musicians were seeking freedom of another kind: new rhythm patterns, fresh harmonies, more space to solo.  Their leaders were Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and they wanted to be treated as artists, not entertainers. But as the war raged on, a recording ban continued to keep their innovations hidden from most Americans.

Superimposed title:
Episode 8
Dedicated to Chaos

VOICE 7.10:  Jazz expresses the hope of a free people [who] hunger for a better life. It is based upon individuality which is contrary to the very fundamentals of Nazism.
					Earl Hines
(Courtney B. Vance)

NARRATOR VII-4: 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.  
	But despite their domination of  Europe, the Nazis had failed to crush jazz -- the music the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had once called “the art of the subhuman.” 

[mx: Benny Goodman  “Makin Whoopee” 1935 JZMX 66.13]

NARRATOR VII-4.1: 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.  

[mx: Charlie and his Orchestra “Making Whoopee” JZWS 8.14 1942 from “Hitler’s Airways”]

NARRATOR VII-6: 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 USA.
You are the goys folks,
We are the boys, folks —
We’re makin’whoopee!

STAGED NAZI FILM
NARRATOR VII-7:  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.”
	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. 

[mx:  Josh White “Uncle Sam Says” 1941 JZMX 40.16]

Well, airplanes flyin’ cross the land and the sea,
Everybody flyin’ 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

VOICE 7.17: 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 the challenge both to win democracy for ourselves at home and to help win the war for democracy the world over.
A. Phillip Randolph
[November, 1942]
(Keith Lee Grant)

NARRATOR VII-8: 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. 
	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 same old Jim Crow.
Uncle Sam says, two camps for black and white”
But when trouble starts, we’ll all be in the 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”;
Let’s get together and kill Jim Crow today.

Superimposed title:
The Street

[mx: Artie Shaw and his Orchestra “Summertime” 1941 JZMX 25.24]

VOICE 7.18 In the late ... twenties and the very early thirties, novelists, poets, newspapers 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
								(Samuel L. Jackson)

NARRATOR VII-31: 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.  Six were killed, 700  injured, and nearly 1500 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 any more.

[mx: Count Basie and his Orchestra “Taxi War Dance” 1939 JZMX 38.14]

	By this time the living heart of jazz had already moved to a single block of old brownstones on the West Side —Fifty-Second Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. 
	Musicians called it simply “The Street.”
		
DAN MORGENSTERN (#14)//  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 VII-31.1: There were seven 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.
	
GEORGE WEIN (#3a) [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, 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, 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 dollars that my father had given us, to go out // We’d go to five 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 o’clock in the morning, I was half asleep but I wasn’t asleep.  And //  you felt that musicians were playing for you.]/
	
NARRATOR VII-32: 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 women, 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.” 

STAN LEVEY (#22) They loved her.  They loved her.  Soon as she would walk on, shoo!  Complete silence.  I mean, it could be chaos going on in the club.  Just total silence.  She had that presence, soon as she walked on, that look.  And you knew you hadda shut up and listen.  And they did.  She was fantastic.

[mx:  Duke Ellington Orchestra “New Black and Tan Fantasy” 1949 
JZSONY 1.02]

NARRATOR VII-32.1: 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’d 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.

[mx: Billie Holiday  “Solitude” 1941 JZMX 40.04]

JIMMY ROWLES (#19B) The way she’d sing any song like, "My Solitude," anything that has that feeling, you know she had a very, very lonesome, was part of her life, and she had run into a awful lot of men that didn't treat her very well.  And then all this, that she had been raped when she was very young and all that kind of stuff.  All this that was inside of Lady Day came out of her with the words,...

BUCK O'NEIL (#19A)  I still play her records now. // When you saw her, //  it was just so different than any other person you'd seen on stage singin'.  The way she would sell a song. (#19B)  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, it, it just, just made you feel good all over or, it make you, he, she make you wanta, make you want to cry.  It'll bring back to you great moments in your life and it might bring back the saddest moments in your life.  This was Billie Holiday.  //

Superimposed title:
We Need To Be Free

date:
Duke Ellington: [202] // And after you’ve absorbed the day and you get all settled down, you’re quiet and 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 the pencil, jot it down, // and usually before you go to sleep, you got the next part of it. (Laugh)

[mx: Duke Ellington Orchestra  “Harlem Airshaft” 1945 JZMX 33.25]

NARRATOR VII-38: 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 twenty 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 Indigo” in fifteen minutes while waiting for his mother to finish cooking dinner.

 [mx:  Duke Ellington “Prelude to a Kiss” 1938 JZMX 52.01]

NARRATOR VII-47.1: 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.”

WYNTON MARSALIS (#60)  Well, with Duke Ellington you're not going to get to know him too well.  Because he has a certain space that he has 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 was a great flirter.  So he was 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 a job she has.  So his flirt is going to come to you, "How did you know that, Duke?"  Oho.]  

[mx: Duke Ellington “Jack The Bear” 1940 JZMX 66.08]

NARRATOR VII-39:  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 —  “eighteen maniacs,” he once said. // -- each had special strengths and a unique sound Ellington cleverly exploited. 
	
GARY GIDDINS (#420B) //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 gonna be by Bubber Miley, you know that it's gonna have a certain quality that it won't have if it's played by Johnny Hodges.  Cootie Williams solo is different from an Arthur Whetsol solo.  That's why Ellington did not write a concerto for trumpet. He wrote a “Concerto for Cootie.”  He took the musicians, what they could do, what their personalities were, and then // he made them the center pieces in the play, in the musical work.

[mx: Duke Ellington in Tommy Dorsey Orchestra “The Minor Goes A Muggin’”  1945 JZMX 33.26]

NARRATOR VII-40: 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.

VOICE Z-23: 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 Stewart]
(Delroy Lindo)

[mx: Duke Ellington “Chocolate Shake”  1941 JZMX 58.24]

STANLEY CROUCH (#31!!)  [//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, in, in the Negro world, because see, I think from slavery forth, we just didn’t like to listen.  No!  So, somebody telling you over and over, “You got to do this...”  You know, “I’m not doing that!  Just ‘cause 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 to one guy and say, you know, “So and so said you’re not really playing, that you’re ...”  And then, he’d go to the other guy and say, “You know, ... he said you’re duhduhduh...”  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 then the other guy, right, and then in the process of playing it, they would both sound so good that that would resolve the argument.  And then he had 2 guys who got along again and he had a great performance.]
[mx Duke Ellington Orchestra “Cottontail” 1940 JZMX 4.15]
NARRATOR VII-43: 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,” the bass player Milt Hinton said, “he was an animal.”
His nickname was “the Brute.”
MILT HINTON (#21)  // I've gone to his house with his mother in Kansas City, his mother was a school teacher, and when he was in his mother's house he was like little Lord Fauntelroy, and we would go right around the corner and go and have a beer and he'd knock four people down before we got out of the door good.
NARRATOR VII-43.1: 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 tune his boss had written especially for him - “Cottontail.”
 [kine: 1940 soundie of “Cottontail” begins, with Ben Webster in full cry down front.]

GARY GIDDINS (#314) “Cottontail” 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 40s 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, it epitomized what an exciting, energetic, almost liberating kind of music that it was.  And so it inspired dancers.

[mx:  Duke Ellington “Black, Brown and Beige” 1944 JZMX 37.01]

GARY GIDDINS (#133a)  [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 three minute recording.  // And because so much of big band music was associated with dance and pop numbers and and show tunes, people began to think of the music as though it couldn’t work beyond those limitations.]/ (#133b)  [and so he moved the music beyond the three-minute level // He began to explore areas of the music that no one else had really been willing to wade into.] 
	
NARRATOR VII-61:  On the evening of January 23, 1943, as Soviet troops struggled to break the Nazi strangle-hold 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 three movements.  He called the piece “Black, Brown and Beige -- a tone  parallel to the history of the Negro in America.”

MSGR: JOHN SANDERS (#15A) “Black, Brown and Beige,” I think in 1943 was a culmination of this movement of writing about Negro-Americans (#15B) Duke wanted to capture the mood of the slaves working on the, on the plantation, out in the fields.  The first part of “Black, Brown and Beige” is called the work song.  And how well he captured that with the band. // You just could see this and feel it.  And then, with this, there was a religious element.  Duke wrote a second movement called “Come Sunday”  which was an expression of a 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 Sunday” was an expression of a longing for liberation, a longing for freedom.  That expression with Jaun Tizol’s opening statement on the valve-trombone with Ray Nance 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, began to fill in cities, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, New York.  And get into the full stream of Urban life and living.

JOYA SHERRILL (#14) he was really fighting for freedom, the limitations that have been put on blacks through the years was really unacceptable.  And so he was really shouting, musically, saying, “We need to be free.”

NARRATOR VII-61.1: 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. 
	
MSGR JOHN SANDERS (#10) 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.// (#9B)  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.
	
VOICE Z-21: // 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
[Richard O. Boyer]
(Philip Bosco)
******

[mx/kine:  Louis Jordan “Caldonia” 1956]

NARRATOR VIII-38:  Louis Jordan  loved playing jazz with an orchestra, loved singing the blues, too.
	But after the big band craze died away and the bop era began, “jazzmen played mostly for themselves,” he said, “I wanted to play for the people... not just hep cats.”
	He did just that, taking the simplest, most crowd pleasing aspects of swing and producing hit after novelty hit.
	“With my little band,” he said, “I did everything they did with a big band. 
	“I made the blues jump.” 
	Millions of black fans who had once followed jazz, were now dancing to a new kind of music.
	It was called Rhythm and Blues.
[mx:  Django Reinhardt “Solitude” 1937 JZMX 55.17]

BERTRAND TAVERNIER (#1A)  Jazz for a lot of people, //  was a way from Jean Paul Sartre for Boris Vian, for all those people it was a way of fighting against conformist, fighting against the spirit of Vichy.  Fighting against the, the, the German atmosphere. (#1B) ...it was a symbol of the Resistance.  Not only because it was American, but it was to a music // created // by blacks and that was important when you are fighting against a racist government.

NARRATOR VII-45: By 1943, as Allied forces liberated Sicily and Southern Italy, the Nazis //  banned even the word “jazz” in the rest of occupied Europe.

 [mx:  Django Reinhardt “Shine” 1936 JZMX 55.16]

NARRATOR VII-45.1: //In defiance//Parisian musicians simply changed the titles of American tunes, // and kept right on swinging: “In the Mood” became “Ambiance;” “Holy Smoke” “Joyeuse Fumee;” and Count Basie’s “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” turned into “Dansant dans la Clairiere.”
	// Occupied Paris saw a flowering of jazz music not seen there since the 1920’s.   Rebellious French fans called themselves “Zazous” — after the frantic scatting of one of their idols, Cab Calloway.
	And because they could not see American performers in person, they looked to their own, home-grown jazz heroes instead, including the master of the guitar, Django Reinhardt.
	
[kine of Django Reinhardt performing 1955]

NARRATOR VII-46: Reinhardt was born in a gypsy encampment in Belgium and had never even heard jazz till he was 20 years old. 
	In 1930, someone played him a record of Louis Armstrong’s “Dallas Blues.”  He wept at the beauty of it — and determined to learn to perform this astonishing music for himself. 
	He learned it so fast that soon he and the French violinist Stéphane Grappelli were leading their own band, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France.  During the War, Reinhardt soon found himself the toast of Paris, the best jazz musician in a city starved for jazz and the liberty it symbolized.
	His left hand had been severely disfigured in a fire, but Reinhardt managed to play with such power and imagination that once the great classical guitarist Andres Segovia demanded to know where he could get a copy of the music he was playing.
	“You can’t,” Reinhardt laughed. “I just made it up.”

BERTRAND TAVERNIER (#2) Jazz is a music which can incorporate many other kind of musics // and Django uses gypsy roots to incorporate some element of the gypsy music in jazz and it goes well.  // the idea of combining the sound of a guitar and // the violin was // very very new at that time. // It’s wonderful // I think Django is one of those musicians a little bit like, I think,  Charlie Parker.  You, you have an impression that he never played a wrong note.  Never.

These Things Can’t Happen

Superimposed title:
June 6, 1944

[mx:  Benny Goodman “Somebody Stole My Gal” 1940 JZMX 50.31]
DAVE BRUBECK (#10) ...when you get a group of musicians really playing and in the 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, its the thing that expresses the United States, it expresses freedom. All over the world, Jazz is accepted as the music of freedom, its the most, its more important than baseball.
NARRATOR VII-77: 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 three-day pass, and shipped out to Europe in the summer of 1944, fully expecting to go right into combat.
[mx:  Count Basie and his Orchestra “Let Me See” 1940 JZMX 50.32]
DAVE BRUBECK (#15)[...I finally ended up in Europe three 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 the truck, where the side of the truck came down and made a stage, and they asked over their loud speaker, 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 VII-78: 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.
[mx:  Glenn Miller “American Patrol” 1944 JZMX 41.06]
	
	But when Dave Brubeck and the Wolf Pack Band got home, nothing in America had changed.

[mx:  Dave Brubeck “Indiana” 1949 JZMX 38.16]

DAVE BRUBECK (#17) [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, you guys.' He said, 'I wonder why I went through all of this?'] /#18 [...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 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.]

******

[mx: Charlie Parker “Bird Gets the Worm” 1947 JZMX 36.26]
JACKIE MCLEAN (#4) 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 VII-81: 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.
	Four 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 “Koko.” 

[mx: Charlie Parker “Koko” 1945 JZMX 5.04]

GARY GIDDINS (#8A)  "Koko" is 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. // (#1A!!!) For two years before then there was a recording ban, so nobody around the country heard Charlie Parker.  It was explosive, out of nowhere.  It was, the first thing you have to remember about Parker before you get into the musicological innovations is that it was shocking, the way Louis Armstrong was shocking in the 1920's.//

NARRATOR VII-82: “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.

VOICE 7.1: Usually, music gives resonance to memory ....  but not the music then in the making...// Its rhythms were out of stride, 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
(Delroy Lindo) 

END CREDITS 
[mx: Duke Ellington “Main Stem” 1942 JZMX 72.04]