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> Jazz: Ellington and Brubeck

Jazz is America's own unique art form. Hedrick Smith and his team have created prime-time specials on two of it's most legendary figures: Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck. The story is not just about the music that these two giants have created. Behind the music is a rich commentary about American history and culture.

Duke Ellington's Washington
Edward Kennedy Ellington is one of the most recognized figures in jazz. But he is just one in a rich legacy of shining talent to come out of Washington's unique and vibrant African-American community. At the dawn of the 20th century, before the Harlem Renaissance, Duke Ellington's Washington was the social and cultural capital of Black America. From 1900 to 1920, it was this country's largest African American community. Anchored by Howard University and federal government jobs, this community became a magnet for African American intellectuals and sent a stream of shining talents to the nation for generations. It developed a prosperous black middle class, which forged a strong society of churches, newspapers, businesses and civic institutions. Its businesses were black owned and run; its buildings, designed, built and financed by blacks; its entertainment, by and for African Americans. This was a proud and elegant community that flourished despite, or perhaps even because, of Jim Crow, the oppressive segregation that forced blacks to create their own separate community. Ellington's career is a microcosm of the greater arts community in this enclave of Washington, DC and his career and music serve as the backdrop and springboard for a larger discussion of the heyday, decline, and resurgence of this truly remarkable area.

Rediscovering Dave Brubeck
Dave Brubeck burst onto the American jazz scene in the late 1940s as one of America's most innovative jazz musicians - a prime mover in the emergence of West Coast Jazz - and has endured as a musician with global popularity for the past 50 years. He was one of the first to take jazz to college campsues and also one of the first to take it behind the Iron Curtain as the idiom of freedom. His career has been punctuated by huge popular success: By 1954, as a very young musician, he made the cover of Time magazine. "Take Five," the jazz tune composed by Brubeck's velvety alto sax player Paul Desmond has become a clqassic and their album, "Time Out", was the first jazz record to go gold. Despite the enormous and enduring popularity of his music, Brubeck has his setbacks - fights with Desmond, intense scrutiny from East Coast critics, a swimming accident that nearly ended his career, and a battle with Columbia Records to issue "Time Out."

In this program, we follow Brubeck on the road, where he is still going strong as a performer and composer in his 80s. Brubeck takes time sit down at the piano and show Hedrick Smith how he gets creative ideas and to recall a life that not only tells the story of other jazz greats but illumunates racial and cultural issues that marked American life in the 50's and 60's. From his days as an WW II army bandleader, where Brubeck led one of the first racially integrated groups, to his defiance of southern Jim Crow laws in the 60's that drove him to cancel 22 concerts rather than replace bassist Eugene Wright with a white musician, Brubeck fought to desegretate jazz and its audiences.