This program profiles, with first-hand observation and historical detail, the pivotal people and places in American jazz. Includes archive footage of performances. Ella Fitzgerald ; Willie "The Lion" Smith ; Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Lunceford ; Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Charles Mingus, Sarah Vaughan,...

Discusses the life and career of the eighteenth-century Austrian composer.

Discusses the life and career of the eighteenth-century German composer.

Discusses the life and career of the eighteenth-century German composer and organist.

The most famous of the bandmaster-composers was John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), who in 1880 became leader of the U.S. Marine band. In 1892, he organized his own band that toured throughout the world. Known as The March King, Sousa was a highly skilled composer of marches. He wrote more than one hundred of them, including the famous Stars and Stripes Forever that became the official United States march in 1987. A strong-willed child, Sousa s first memories...

Chronicles the troubled life of the nineteenth-century Russian composer. Includes sidebars about such topics as serfs, Leo Tolstoy, and the invention of the phonograph.

A biography of the nineteenth-century American musician whose many compositions include "Oh, Susannah," "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair," "My Old Kentucky Home," and "Old Folks at Home."