University of Wisconsin - Extension

Celebrate the nation's birthday with a testimonial to one of its great indigenous art forms. http://www.wpt.org">Wisconsin Public Television (WPT) will present Ken Burns's Jazz in its entirety on Wednesday and Thursday, July 4 and 5.

On each day, five parts of the 10-part series will air starting at 8 a.m. On July 4, the presentation runs through 4:30. On July 5, Jazz ends at 5:30 p.m.

Burns focuses intently on the music's origins as he surveys an American landscape divided by war, segregated by race, united through swing and dance, and ultimately redeemed through this most American of musics. "Jazz," the drummer Art Blakey liked to say, "washes away the dust of everyday life."

"Jazz is much more than a study of this extraordinary American music," Burns said upon the film's premiere in January. "Jazz offers a precise prism through which so much of American history can be seen. Embedded in the music, in its riveting biographies and soaring artistic achievement, can be found our oft-neglected conscience, a message of hope and transcendence, of affirmation in the face of adversity, unequaled in the unfolding drama and parade we call American history."

With 75 interviews, more than 500 pieces of music, 2,400 stills and more than 2,000 archival film clips, the series follows the growth and development of jazz from the gritty streets of New Orleans to the Lincoln Gardens on Chicago's South Side where Louis Armstrong first won fame, from Prohibition-era speakeasies to the wide-open clubs of Kansas City, from Times Square's elegant Roseland Ballroom where only whites were allowed to dance, to Harlem's more egalitarian Savoy Ballroom where people of all colors mingled.

Throughout, Jazz is the story of race and race relations in the United States. "I contend," Duke Ellington once said, "that the Negro is the creative voice of America, is creative America, and it was a happy day¿when the first unhappy slave landed on its shores."

Burns said, "Ellington saw as clearly as anyone that African-American history is not at the periphery of our culture but at the center of it, the ironies and paradoxes of which helped to create jazz in the first place and which suggest the redemptive future possibilities of this great but flawed republic for all of us."

On July 4, WPT will air "Gumbo" (Beginnings to 1917), "The Gift" (1917-1924), "Our Language" (1924-1928), "The True Welcome" (1929-1935) and "Swing: Pure Pleasure" (1935-1937).

On July 5, WPT presents "Swing: The Velocity of Celebration" (1937-1939), "Dedicated to Chaos" (1940-1945), "Risk" (1945-1955), "The Adventure" (1955-1960) and "A Masterpiece by Midnight" (1961-present).

WPT is a service of the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board and the University of Wisconsin-Extension.

Wisconsin Public Television is a place to grow through learning on WHA-TV/Madison, WPNE-TV/Green Bay, WHRM-TV/Wausau, WLEF-TV/Park Falls, WHLA-TV/La Crosse and WHWC-TV/Menomonie-Eau Claire.