Jazz Legends in Their Own Words

Jazz has been hailed as one of the most significant musical forms

of the 20th-century - America's gift to the world...

..and the BBC archives contain hundreds of hours of performance

and interviews with some of the greatest names in American jazz.

Well, here we are again.

But it could so easily have been otherwise.

Towards the end of the 1930s,

as Hitler's Nazi party tightened its grip on German society,

the Director-General of the BBC, Lord Reith,

expressed some sympathy with the regime in one specific matter -

the music of the moment, known as hot jazz.

In a memo, he described its influence as "degrading".

"Germany has banned hot jazz, and I'm sorry that we should be

"behind in dealing with this filthy product of modernity."

The very word "jazz" was said to be derived for a slang name

for sex, and it became a label to an age of excess.

Luckily for us, Lord Reith didn't have the last word on the subject.

The BBC, in fact, led the way with coverage of jazz on television.

From the late '50s to the late '70s,

one legend after another from the golden age of jazz was captured

playing and talking about some of the century's greatest music.

It is not the length and it ain't what you do, it's how you do it.

That's nice.

APPLAUSE

It's fun. My... My thing is having fun.

From the ever suave Duke Ellington...

Yep!

..to the irrepressible Louis Armstrong...

..to that master of swing Count Basie...

..to the man who blew in the dazzling new style

known as bebop, Dizzy Gillespie...

# Ba-da-ba-da-ba-ba-bada... #

..and the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald...

..together, they created a musical revolution.

This is how they did it in their own words.

APPLAUSE

There was no more celebrated jazz survivor and no greater entertainer

than the man they called Pops - Louis Armstrong.

For me, the most incredible thing about Louis Armstrong

is that I listen to lots of his records

and when I hear him sing a song, I suddenly go,

"That's a fantastic song,"

and I'd heard the song before, I might have heard it,

it might have sort of been in my consciousness but never noticed it,

but when he does it, I go,

"That's a great song. I want to play this song now," and that is what

a great artist is - an artist who basically makes you notice something

that you hadn't noticed before and brings it to life.

# Now the pale moon's shining

# On the fields below

# The folks are crooning soft and low... #

No-one had a better pedigree.

His lips scarred from a lifetime's blowing,

he's singing about a Deep South that only ever existed in song.

# When it's sleepy time down south. #

But he knew the reality.

After all, he came from where the music came from - New Orleans.

It was here that the great gumbo mix of African rhythms - ragtime,

gospel, blues and marching bands - all came together.

He'd had a brutally hard start in life.

His mother worked as a prostitute

and as a boy, Louis had a job delivering coal

to the brothels or sporting houses

of the city's notorious Storyville district.

As he told the BBC in 1970, he kept his eyes and ears open.

Well, quite naturally,

they're standing there with nothing on but a chemise,

what you call them, teddies, at the time, you know,

so they'd say, "Little boy, put some coal on the grid," you know.

Quite naturally, I stopped to take a look.

If they'd seen me, they'd have slapped me down.

Yeah, I used to do all that. Well, I used to hear all that good music too.

You could hear the best music there was down there -

all your best musicians.

Music came to his rescue.

The young Louis was sent to the local waifs' home

for discharging a firearm in the street.

He was given a bugle to learn, joined the band

and soon got noticed.

I was pretty fast on the horn. They used to call me Little Louis.

And I went up real fast from that.

That's where I comes to getting on among all the sporting people,

the women used to come in, big stockings full of money,

and make me have a bottle of beer with them and...

Could blow them blues, you know, they liked the way I blowed them blues.

And then King Oliver thought so much of my blowing so he'd come

down there when he got off and sit upon the bench and listen to me play.

He used to tell me all the time, "Play more lead on that horn."

I was just like... # Da-da-da... #

..like the guys run up and down the horn nowadays, bopping and things,

I was doing all of that, fast fingers and everything,

but he was telling me, "Play some lead on the horn, boy," you know.

Louis played the river boats,

but when his hero and father figure, Joe "King" Oliver,

took his band to Chicago, he soon called for his protege to join him.

He was following the course of the great migration

undertaken by thousands of black Americans from the segregated South,

only in this case,

it was the start of one of the most fabulous careers in American music.

In Joe Oliver's band was Lil Hardin,

a classically trained piano player.

She would become the second Mrs Armstrong

and gave Louis the push he needed.

I told him, I said,

"Now, I don't want to be married to a second trumpet player."

He said, "What are you talking about?"

I said, "I don't want to be married to a second trumpet player,

"I want you to play first."

He said, "I can't play first, Joe's playing first."

I said, "Well, that's why you've got to quit."

He said, "I can't quit Mr Joe, Mr Joe sent for me

"and I can't quit him."

And I said, "Well, it's Mr Joe or me."

No contest.

Armstrong left and joined the New York band of Fletcher Henderson,

and jazz would never be the same again.

His sense of melody was just

so captivating, yet there was always a feeling of excitement

when you'd hear him play.

And really he's the person where the group interaction of jazz playing

from the New Orleans-Dixieland traditional style,

it's where it changed and turned into the soloist.

He really was the first great soloist.

To stand on your own two legs

and suddenly bring the crowd alight with a solo was the thing

that he started doing

and by 1928, he was simply wonderful at it.

Louis trod a very fine line

between being a popular entertainer, somebody who had enormous appeal

to the general public,

both by being an avuncular personality

and a great singer, a wonderful interpreter of a lyric,

but, at the same time, he was an artist.

He was somebody whose every note

on the trumpet was profound improvisation.

Louis Armstrong's performance on recordings from the late '20s

became the blueprints for the future of jazz.

And he'd always save enough

to play the high note at the end.

So there'd be this great form that he had,

this natural form,

he wouldn't play too many high notes before that very one at the end

so it did have maximum impact at the end.

SUCCESSION OF NOTES

HIGH NOTE

Of course, he got the great West End Blues cadenza

which is at the beginning.

For once, he turns it upside down,

so the beginning of West End Blues goes something like this.

It's just fantastic stuff that no-one had done before,

so the combination of this melodic, harmonic invention plus the sound.

Louis' first movie appearance was astonishing too,

in a bizarre short in which he performed a song called Shine.

Louis is

seen as a character in a dream of somebody

who's hit on the head and we go to a mythical heaven in which

this group of African-American musicians is playing

and we see Louis himself, a very fit man wearing a leopard skin...

# My hair is curly

# Just because

# My teeth are pearly... #

Shine might be a racist lyric, "Just cos my hair is curly,

"Just cos my teeth are pearly,"

but, on the other hand, Louis dignifies it.

# Just because my colour's shady

# Makes a difference maybe

# That's why they call me shine... #

I don't think he's miming in that clip.

We're actually hearing what he's playing

and what he's playing is instant creation.

Very few characters combine a sense that

you're in the presence of art being created with every note,

but, at the same time, accessible and somebody who reaches out

and connects with the person in the street, and I think

Louis does that better than anybody in the entire history of jazz.

By the early '30s, although Louis

was at the top of his game musically, he had other worries.

He'd been arrested for possession of marijuana in California and

gangsters from Chicago and New York were wrangling over his contract.

To escape, his manager booked a tour to Europe.

He arrived in style and gained a nickname - Satchmo.

Louis' concerts at the London Palladium provoked mixed reactions.

Some walked out.

This film from that period shows the style wilder

than many record fans were expecting.

One newspaper compared him to James Joyce,

another to an untrained gorilla.

# Now, Dinah

# Is there anyone finer

# In the state of Carolina?

# If there is, then you know

# Show her to me... #

But the important thing was, the young man from New Orleans

was on the way to becoming an international star.

He would revisit Europe many times over the next four decades,

where enthusiastic journalists waited to greet him.

SWITCHES RECORDING OFF

And we are very, very glad, Mr Armstrong,

to welcome you into Panorama this evening. I hope you enjoyed

-listening to that just now.

-It's good to be here.

-Thank you.

-Always good to come to England.

Now, with you, is Kenneth Allsop of the Daily Mail.

Kenneth Allsop knows a lot more about jazz than I do

and you are now his victim for the next seven minutes.

-Well, let's sit down and make ourselves comfortable, Louis.

-OK.

-It's good to see you back in London again.

-Oh, yeah.

-Always say, bless the British.

-I see Mrs Armstrong is with you.

-Hi again.

-Hello.

-How are you?

Mrs Armstrong, do you always go with Louis wherever he goes?

-Yes, I do, Kenneth.

-It's your job to look after him.

Well, that's part of my marital vows, to take care of the husband.

Through the '50s and '60s, Louis became a proud ambassador

for America, even travelling to Africa to spread the word of jazz.

Do you feel that jazz is a universal language?

Do you think it overcomes politics and nationalities?

Oh, yes, it's stronger than the Masons - jazz.

Everywhere you've been, have you found people like jazz?

That's right. I mean, we couldn't say nothing in their language,

but every time we start wailing, that was it.

We didn't have to worry about nothing then.

Louis Armstrong was a buoyant character

and he very much saw himself as an entertainer,

so entertaining was what he was about,

but I think with any entertainer who becomes extremely popular,

and he became extremely popular, there's always a backlash

and he suffered from that backlash.

-Are you still playing the same kind of music now as you played...

-Why...

Why should I change? I originated all this whatever it is derived from.

Why should I play anything different?

Do you think your warm and emotional kind of entertaining can make

-better friends between black and white people?

-I think so.

I mean, I'm black and I have a lot of white fans...

..so you've got it in technicolour there.

By the 1960s, a new kind of political confrontation over

civil rights, and a new generation of jazz musicians were making

Satchmo style seem more outdated than ever.

# Oh, man

# Oh, man

# Ba-da-ba-dap

# Of every toots

# It went like this

# Oh, yes

# Take a wrap, fellas

# Find her an empty lap, yeah

# Oh, Dolly

# Oh, Dolly, doh-doh-doh

# Ba-dah! #

White people are responsible for my success,

and I don't care how much they march, I mean,

after all, white people stood behind Sats to put him

right where he is, so you know I've got the love of them,

ain't nobody going to tell me nothing.

I said in my donations for the cause of whatever they're doing,

you know, with the Negroes to the extent,

but the Negro didn't put me where I am today, the white people did.

Whites did.

So now on the rebound, the credit goes to the white people.

Period.

Louis said at a fairly early stage in his life

that what a black entertainer should do, for his own security,

was to have a well-connected white man

standing by him who would put his hand -

this is how he put it - who would put his hand on his shoulder

and say, "This is my N word," which I'm not going to say,

and, of course, that was right at the time, if you wanted to look

after yourself and get on, and he'd been treated in that way

in New Orleans well, so it was experience that told him that.

Succeeding generations did not want to hear that

and so he would get into trouble, PC-type trouble, later in life

and it became attached to his performing style as well

because there was the grinning and the mugging

and the handkerchief-waving and so on and all that seemed to attach

to a very old, almost Minstrel era view of what a performer should be.

Louis Armstrong left his mark on the world of music

and on everyone who ever met him.

BOY PLAYS "Basin Street Blues"

1968 - Louis comes to England and my father takes me to the airport

to meet him, as he walks over, I start playing Basin Street Blues

for him and you can see here the pictures.

He's got his tongue out there.

He's going, "Look at this little kid here,"

so...he stands and listens and actually bends down

and puts his hand to his ear.

I mean, great encouragement there and afterwards he takes my hand

and I think, "He's going to shake my hand," but, no, what did he do?

There, he picks it up and kisses my hand, which is

a fantastic sort of gesture, again, of a genuine man.

HE CHUCKLES

That was it.

You couldn't want a better start in life if you wanted to play

the trumpet, meet Louis Armstrong, your hero, at the age of seven.

It was a great start.

If Satchmo was the great entertainer, another man would

take the music to even higher levels of sophistication and artistry...

..a jazz legend that had the interviewers

reaching for their superlatives.

It seems indisputable that Duke Ellington occupies

the same sort of position in the world of jazz as Bradman used to

in the world of cricket or Picasso does in the world of painting. He's the unchallengeable master.

His name oughtn't to be Duke Ellington but King Ellington.

Along with Cocteau, Chaplin, Picasso, Hemingway and Orson Welles,

he shared an international reputation that can never be tarnished.

He's also been described as one of the greatest living composers,

or the only great living American composer.

If anyone could handle that kind of introduction,

it was Edward Kennedy Ellington, the Duke.

Thanks so very much, ladies and gentlemen.

All the kids in the band want you to know that we do love you madly.

Worldly, elegant, almost mockingly creative,

the Duke was charm personified.

He was an indulged child of middle-class parents in Washington DC.

His father worked occasionally as a butler in the White House, so it was

with some satisfaction that he was honoured there on his 70th birthday.

In the royalty of American music,

no man swings more or stands higher than the Duke.

MUSIC: "Take the 'A' Train" By Duke Ellington

His achievement comes not from his virtuosity at the piano,

but the musical legacy of his famous orchestra,

which he kept on the road for over half a century.

He left behind over 5,000 pieces of music on his death in 1974.

He graduated as a commercial artist,

even had a business as a sign painter,

but his part-time activities as a pianist and bandleader were so successful

he set off for New York to make his fortune in the music business.

By 1927, he had the hottest band in Harlem,

broadcasting nightly, coast to coast,

from the notorious Cotton Club.

-ANNOUNCER:

-Hello, everybody, welcome to our famous Cotton Club.

Great to see so many friends here tonight enjoying themselves in spite of the cover charge,

and if you can spare a minute from your merrymaking,

I'd like to have the pleasure of introducing

the greatest living master of jungle music,

the rip-roaring harmony hound, Duke Ellington.

Take your bow, Dukie!

The jungle is a place I've always had an inclination toward,

because nobody's ever been to the jungle.

The Cotton Club was for whites only.

The audience came uptown for a night of walking on the wild side.

He treated his band as a theatrical troupe.

He didn't so much appoint musicians as cast them as characters,

and they all had to have a strong instrumental character themselves.

Ellington evoked the sounds of this fantasy jungle by employing

the talents of a trumpeter called Bubber Miley.

Bubber Miley, he was the first one to do a jungle sound with a plunger.

Now, if I can get a cup...

So, imagine that's a plunger, so he'd be able to do...

PLAYS BLUES MELODY

And then he'd put a growl with it. So this is how they found out,

they just tried things over the bell, you know?

PLAYS WITH GROWLS AND WAHS

The Duke's appeal to white audiences made him a natural for the movies.

But Hollywood didn't dare to feature an integrated band,

so the lighter-skinned trombonist on the right had to be blacked up.

APPLAUSE

Hey, man, I like that piano player! LAUGHTER

He's hot. He's a hot kid.

Duke Ellington was two things.

He was a very creative composer,

and he was one of the most astonishingly astute magpies in jazz history.

He could spot 16 bars of melody that would work very well with

another 16 bars that he'd just written,

and there's a degree of controversy about the degree to which

he "stole" from his sidemen, but there's certainly no doubt that

tunes that they'd done nothing with, he worked out how to package

and present in an extremely successful way.

Mr Dankworth, Mr Lyttelton, the floor is yours.

-Duke, we...

-Good morning, gentlemen.

-Good morning.

We live on legends over here.

There are a great many legends about as to how you have composed your tunes in the past.

If it's not asking a trade secret, how do you like to compose?

How do I like to?

Oh, any way at all, just so it comes out sounding interesting enough.

-Do you compose at the piano, for instance?

-Sometimes.

And then again I do a lot of writing on...

I think doing it on trains is one of the best ways. So many times in bed.

You know, you get an idea, and no matter how tired you are,

you have to put the light on and reach over and maybe... You know.

Or sometimes a tune just comes into you, knocks you down,

you can't resist it, you just have to put it down.

And usually it associates itself with some specific performer in the band.

MUSIC: "Mood Indigo"

Ellington evolved a sound of using muted brass

and the clarinet, in fact, to make a kind of music

he kept through his whole career called mood music,

which is very harmonically sophisticated, yet simple sounding, melodically.

Melodies such as Mood Indigo.

Mood Indigo is like a swan on the pond, because it just

moves along and all you see is this beautiful tune going slowly past,

but of course the harmonic flippers underneath

are kicking like crazy to keep it all moving.

In the winter of 1965, the Duke Ellington Orchestra was

filmed by the BBC on an extensive European tour.

Their non-stop travelling had been a feature of the band's existence since the '30s.

Night after night after night, different town, different town.

Tough economy seats, ratty old buses, cold.

What were they eating?

Were they allowed through the front door? They have to come round the back?

What was the race situation? I mean... Yeah - travelling? Tough.

It's not for sissies.

I mean, let me tell you this, folks, if you decide to run a band,

you're going to upset some of your musicians.

You know, even if it's over something silly like,

what time are we all going to have our meal?

Somebody is not going to like it.

So, at any stage during running a band, you'll get called

what would come out in predictive text as the word "aunt" by your musicians.

Johnny and I are both bandleaders.

What is the secret of keeping a band together for as long as you do?

Well, you've got to have a gimmick, Humphrey, it's...

The one I use... I mean, I use a gimmick, you know?

Just give 'em money.

LAUGHTER

Yes, I can see that's very popular.

-JOOLS HOLLAND:

-A big band becomes an animal in itself

and it's one that has to be fed with new music.

What keeps it alive is having new music and having to do shows,

and recording in between that. So it becomes a living entity.

But it can only live by doing lots of shows.

If he couldn't tour, there's nothing else.

That's what the life of a big band is, is touring.

Sometimes you say, well, I know these guys are going to

be dead after making this 500-mile ride tonight when they get in.

And they get in there and they come up and they get a dark on their face,

you know, and they growl, maybe,

and then they blow right up through the ceiling,

better than ever, you know?

Ellington's life is a series of paradoxes.

He's somebody who's a composer and a bandleader,

a pianist and a private man,

a serial philanderer, and a married man.

All these things add up together to make a complex personality

which he very successfully concealed for a lot of his life.

And one of the most successful ways of concealing a double,

duple, triple, quintuple set of layers

is to go on the road, because everywhere you turn up,

you are presenting that persona that you've carefully built up

for yourself to your audience, and the private man stays private.

Have you ever... Have you ever felt the need or indeed done it,

what a lot of jazz musicians do when they get into a sort of tiring routine,

of taking dope or anything like that? Have you ever done that?

No. I'm too primitive, you see. I'm very primitive.

I am THE primitive illiterate, you see, because... LAUGHTER

I mean, so much so that I don't even know what I'm going to

have for breakfast until in the morning, or whenever I wake-up,

I walk into the jungle.

And if I see a twig on this side of the tree, and a bear on that side,

I have to decide whether I want a big meal or a little meal, you know?

LAUGHTER

And, of course, if you have the bear, of course, you have the advantage

of having a coat to wear for the cold season, too.

Mm. I'm not sure I quite understand that, but...

LAUGHTER

Well, you're civilised, you see?

And now one of the segments of our new Impressions Of The Far East suite.

The scene is Isfahan, the solo by Johnny Hodges.

APPLAUSE

Over the years, the Duke's writing became more artful,

more about getting people to listen than dance.

Each extensive foreign tour gave the magpie Duke

new sights, sounds and impressionist fragments to play with.

They were constructed into long-form, loosely structured suites.

MUSIC: "Isfahan"

What Duke Ellington was doing was creating a music that was

really born out of the 20th century, the sound of the 20th century,

the atmosphere of the 20th century.

And so, Duke Ellington is really

one of the great originators, musically, beyond category.

A-one, two...

BAND PLAYS

Well, this is Jones, taken from our latest single record.

And it's a little...

A little melody written for the purpose of giving background

to gentle and cool finger-snapping.

Of course, one never snaps one's fingers on the beat.

It's considered aggressive.

You don't push it, you just let it fall, like this.

And of course, if you're real cool,

then you can manage to effect a tilt of the left earlobe at the same time, like this, you know?

And if you're cooler than that, then, of course,

you tilt the left earlobe on the beat

and snap the finger on the after beat, like this, you know?

As a matter of fact, by routining the tilting of the earlobe

and snapping the finger, one can become as cool as one wishes to be.

In 1930s America,

jazz became a national obsession thanks to something called swing.

It was a dance craze, a teen phenomenon,

and a commercial sensation, examined by the newsreel,

The March Of Time, in its inimitable style.

NEWSREADER: Every day into music shops from coast to coast

go more and more customers, all for the same thing - the latest in swing music.

The joint was jumping for black and white audiences alike.

One of the most celebrated bands had come up the hard way

from jazz's Wild West, Kansas City.

The film Reveille With Beverly showed them in a sophisticated setting

with an easy swing and a front man of unusual charisma.

Of all the jazz musicians who preferred to let their music do the talking,

this man said the most with the least.

He started out in the bars of Harlem where he was an avid student

of Fats Waller, and ended up as jazz aristocracy.

William Basie was born in New Jersey,

toured the vaudeville circuit, and ended up in Kansas City

where he honed his blues-infused style.

The big difference between him and the eastern big bands is that

whereas Duke Ellington was playing for floor shows in the Cotton Club,

and there was a very quick turnaround,

you played six or seven numbers in a half hour set,

then you are off and another band came on,

Basie was used to playing for hours and hours and hours.

His band would be the only one, and it would go on all night.

Basie always looked cool,

and I think the reason for that is if he played frenetically for these

hours of late-night jam sessions in Kansas City, he'd be dead.

As it was, the band developed a very relaxed four-to-the-bar swing

in which the propulsion is shared equally between bass, drums, guitar and piano.

And Basie had that down to a fine art.

I think one of the great attributes of Count Basie's band is just

the unadulterated soulful swingingness of the band.

The rhythm that they... That they conjure.

The sense of blues feeling, and just the hipness. I mean, it's just...

It's staggering, it's absolutely staggering.

And all from this man who is genteel and polite and, you know,

says many things with very few notes.

It's just...awesome.

I love Count Basie.

The great thing about him is just whenever he plays, you can

spot it him. I know it's him a mile off. That's why I love it.

It's just, suddenly, the whole thing sort of...

You don't know why, but as soon as he's doing it,

you're just going like this, and you can't figure out...

A lot of the time, he's not even playing!

But because he's there, he's going like that.

He does one thing, and keeps it going like that, you know?

That's the great thing, him leaving these great gaps. Marvellous.

And everything is just so kind of lazy and perfect,

it just kind of makes you giddy with wanting to swing, you know?

It's a master of swing, that's what Count Basie is.

When you're listened other people playing jazz,

-have you got any particular preference?

-Well, I like any...

Any type of music that, to me, has a little beat with it.

You know, whether it's jazz, swing, modern, rock 'n' roll...

You like rock 'n' roll?

Isn't anything wrong with it, because I've been hearing rock 'n' roll

ever since I've been knowing what music is. Music with a beat,

I guess that they've added a little roll to it, or rock with it,

by the different little vocals and things that's been happening.

As far as the beat is concerned, that's been happening for many, many years.

-It's just not new?

-I don't think the beat's new, really.

-Got it.

-Yes.

-Fine.

Basie was a gentler, more self-effacing man than Ellington.

While there are books and books and books of Ellington quotes,

I don't think I know a single Count Basie bon mot.

Probably the two most famous orchestras of all time

would be your orchestra and Duke's orchestra.

BASIE PLAYS PIANO CHORD

LAUGHTER

All right...

What would you say was the difference? What would you...?

-What are your impressions of the difference between the two bands?

-Class.

Class. LAUGHTER

-The master.

-Really?

-That was the man. That was the man. He was the boss.

-You did play together at one point.

-Yes, we did.

-Really?

I was in the hall.

LAUGHTER

That's right. It's beautiful. The greatest.

Well, I know how he loves your...

It was a pleasure and an honour to be in the same hall with the Duke.

What more can I say? Don't ask me any more about it.

LAUGHTER

In the 1940s came the revolution.

Bebop broke all the rules of conventional melody and rhythm.

One of its pioneers was a virtuoso trumpeter called Dizzy Gillespie.

FAST TEMPO BIGBAND BEBOP

His unique, frenetic style horrified some and enthralled others.

TRUMPET SOLO

Any record with Dizzy Gillespie, for me,

still often sounds the most exciting trumpet playing ever.

I think Dizzy's ability to play thousands of notes in a minute

and know what each one was was second to none.

I can remember the first time I heard Dizzy Gillespie playing.

That was like being punched in the face with music, it was incredible,

and that's done me ever since, really.

I still haven't finished eating that big pie.

It's funny that although bebop really happened in the early 1940s,

something that was born 70 years ago still causes controversy

and is still thought of by some listeners as modern.

In my view, bebop is a very natural evolution.

It's a word that Dizzy Gillespie applied to it a lot.

And it is an evolution of music from people who had simply played

so much of it they wanted somewhere else to go.

So now is the moment you change the chords, you change the rhythm,

and you play differently.

The bebop experiment began in Manhattan, with musicians

from the big bands coming together in after-hours jam sessions.

It reached its critical mass when Gillespie began playing with

the legendary sax player Charlie Parker.

My style developed rapidly after meeting Charlie Parker,

after being inspired by him,

and the same thing held true with Charlie Parker and me.

TRUMPET AND SAXOPHONE PLAY IN UNISON

My main contribution is rhythm, for one thing.

I created a lot of different rhythms from South America

and put it into the music, and also chord progressions.

I showed all the piano players how to play for us, not for the older guys.

You know - "oom-cha, oom-cha, oom-cha".

Charlie Parker developed mostly a selection of notes

and the way that he played the notes, with the accent,

sounded like a rivet, you know? The way that he...

Some slurred and some attacked, and that's the basis of our music.

SAXOPHONE AND TRUMPET TRADE FAST SOLOS

We were very close, we felt one another.

Like, one time I said that when his heart beat the first beat,

mine beat the second beat, and his beat the third, mine beat the fourth.

You know, the heartbeats.

It was just a very close relationship.

And not long. You see, it wasn't a long, long drawn-out thing.

It was very intense and short.

Which is like the...

It's not the length of... It ain't what you do, it's how you do it.

Bebop even had its own uniform,

an arty nod to Parisian style devised by Gillespie himself.

We did this concert, and anybody that came to the concert

with a beret and a goatee and horn-rimmed glasses,

they got in free.

You should have seen the people there with horn-rimmed glasses,

and some of the women painted a goatee here.

Jazz had changed fundamentally.

It would now always be before and after bebop.

The impact of bebop was that the virtuosity and the soulfulness

of the music was able to be fused into yet another dimension.

It was also about small-band interaction,

which then would allow the music that we know as

the more modern forms of jazz to be built.

Experimental modern jazz went on to flourish in small clubs.

Mainstream jazz found home on Jazz 625

on the BBC's new highbrow channel, BBC Two, launched in 1964.

Leading the way was a talented young pianist called Oscar Peterson.

Oscar was at home in the TV age, and a regular guest on Parkinson.

You make it look so easy, actually. Do you ever play a bum note?

Oh, every time.

LAUGHTER

-No. No way.

-Every tune.

-Really?

-Mm-hm.

You never play anything perfectly at all?

-I don't think there is a pianist that plays anything perfectly.

-No.

But we fooled a lot of you, didn't we?

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

But the relaxed manner hid a furiously competitive streak.

Oscar was one of the most competitive men I have ever met.

His father, who was a Pullman porter, used to make him

learn piano exercises, and while his dad went off to the other

side of Canada on a train, Oscar would have to have got them right

by the time the old man came home a few days later.

His old man set him the task of becoming the most competitive,

the best pianist in jazz. There wasn't any second place for Oscar.

He wanted to be the best, and whenever I heard him on stage,

whenever I met him and interviewed him for the BBC,

it was undeniable that he felt that that's what he was.

PIANO SOLO

Peterson's musical hero was at Art Tatum,

who had a fearsome reputation in after-hours piano contests.

He spent 12 to 18 hours a day practising to try and become...

or to have the fluidity of technique that he heard in Art Tatum.

So I'm sure that anybody who was even near

to the kind of technique that he achieved, he would be like,

"Well, I'd better just practise a bit more,"

or, "What have you got for me? Let me see. Let me see what you've got.

"I can take you out, easily."

And, you know, it's just... It's all a bit tongue in cheek.

Sometimes it can get a bit serious

but, ultimately, it's the poetry of the music that matters.

But, obviously, if you've got an edge, and it's because you

are stronger, faster, tougher, or even more delicate, prettier...

..you know, those attributes,

then you're going to shove it in people's faces.

Peterson was given his own show on BBC Two, and even got to

compare notes with Count Basie

on the competitiveness of Art Tatum.

When Art Tatum used to play, he had a trick he used to do.

If a soloist was playing and playing something like this tempo...

MID TEMPO BLUES

..he would lay one of these on him, like...

PLAYS INTRICATE RUN

..and of course... Right?

That's just what you've been doing to me all the time.

LAUGHTER

It's... It's...!

APPLAUSE

And usually, in the after-hours places, you know,

the great instigations that used to go on, they'd see two piano players,

and see Art, and say, "Why don't you play something?"

"Why don't you play something?"

You know, he went straight to the piano

and he, like, just took it apart, literally.

Just wasted everything on the piano.

He would play something like what?

-Pardon?

-He would play something like about eight bars of...

Oh, I can't really do it, because I'm not...

Do just a little bit, about eight bars.

LAUGHTER

-I can't do it, really!

-You do it.

-I've never imitated...

I know, but you just play eight bars.

Just play eight bars.

-Eight bars?

-Just play eight bars...

PLAYS "Someone To Watch Over Me" in Art Tatum Style

That's it! That's it!

APPLAUSE

When he was playing duets with people, he never openly saw it

as what they used to call a cutting competition,

what the pianists used to do in the '30s and '40s,

but I think he saw that it was...

He had to sort of...

He had to be the best.

And why not? Because he kind of was.

BAND PLAYS FINAL NOTES AND FLOURISH

One of the highlights of Oscar's career was his partnership

with one of the great jazz singers of all time, Ella Fitzgerald.

Thank you so much, and thank you, Oscar, that was superb as usual.

And right now we'd like to do one of our Irving Berlin songs

from our Song Book, which is still available.

And we hope you like it, it's called Cheek To Cheek.

# Heaven

# I'm in heaven

# And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak

# And I seem to find... #

Ella Fitzgerald shone as an artist.

She shone as a singer, as an improviser.

Everything worked in Ella.

# ..When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek

# Heaven

# I'm in heaven

# And the cares that hung around me through the week

# Seem to vanish like the gambler's lucky streak

# When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek... #

Ella's long career included swing, bebop, blues and popular songs.

In 1980, at the age of 62,

she told her friend Oscar Peterson about how she got started.

I really didn't think I was going to be a singer.

I was going to be a dancer.

LAUGHTER

Let's do the next tune.

-That's a fact.

-You were really serious about being a dancer?

I really wanted to be a dancer.

I made a bet with some girlfriends of mine,

and we wanted to go to on an amateur contest,

and we just signed our names

and mine was called, so I had to go on.

When I saw all those lights out there,

there was no way in the world I was going to dance.

The man said, "Well, do something! You are out here!"

So I try to sing like Miss Connee Boswell.

And we had a record at home of her singing Object Of My Affection,

and I tried to sing like her, and I won first prize.

HE PLAYS OPENING FLOURISH

# The object of my affection has changed my complexion

# From brown to rosy red

# Rosy red, rosy red... #

They said, "That girl can sing!

LAUGHTER

Got first prize.

12.50.

LAUGHTER

It was one of the best rags-to-riches stories in jazz.

The shy 16-year-old was spotted by bandleader Chick Webb,

became his star vocalist, and even took over his band when he died.

In 1974, the BBC filmed Ella in performance

at Ronnie Scott's club in London.

By this stage of her career, she was more usually seen in concert halls

and festivals, but the intimacy suited her.

She certainly made a night of it.

# We want to leave you happy Don't want to leave you sad

# We want to leave you happy Don't want to leave you sad

# Want to sing some blues but don't want to sing them bad

# Roy wailed for you

# He wailed the blues tonight... #

I love that performance because the thing about Ella Fitzgerald,

she walks on... She's so unpretentious.

She walks on stage, she's got this childlike quality of joy

to be there, like she can't quite believe it's happening, still,

and there they are, the other guys, they obviously love her,

complete respect, warmth coming from all of them.

Before she sings a note, it's a lovable scenario,

and then off she goes and she's a natural.

SHE SINGS SCAT SOLO

She sings with such intelligence.

Her phrasing is never too much.

It's sophisticated, it's classy, it swings, it's got sass,

she's tender, she's foxy

and she's innocent, all at the same time as well.

Thank you so very, very much.

You know, this is my first time in, oh,

many, many years playing a nightclub in London.

I think it's my first time in London.

I was in a little club in Manchester.

They tell me. But anyway...

LAUGHTER

-But you are so beautiful. MAN:

-You're beautiful!

Oh, thank you, my love. I love you, too.

APPLAUSE

How do you feel about being described as sexy but motherly?

At having the same kind of appeal in Britain as the Queen Mother?

The Queen Mother?!

Well, I like the sexy part.

SHE LAUGHS

I'm not quite ready to settle down too low, too much, now.

I still believe!

# Some day he'll come along... #

APPLAUSE

# ..The man I love

# And he'll be big and strong

# The man I love

# And when he comes my way

# I'll do my best to make him stay... #

The song is by George and Ira Gershwin.

It had been part of her repertoire since the '50s,

when she recorded a series of albums known as the Song Books.

They give a jazz treatment to classics from Broadway musicals

and Hollywood movies.

My favourite Ella period is the Song Book era, really through the '50s.

I think that's when she really was in the best voice.

She says that she used to be able to do these Song Books

in three weeks, which is brilliant.

Learning all the lyrics, getting inside the song,

interpreting the song, delivering it with such panache

and such class.

That's amazing. It can take three years to really learn a song.

It can take 30 years to learn a song, to really get it,

but she was in such great form.

# ..He'll build a little home

# Just meant for two... #

Ira Gershwin said, "I never knew how good our songs were

"until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them."

When Ella died, one writer summed up the achievement of the Song Books.

"Here was a black woman popularising urban songs

"often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience

"of predominantly white Christians.

"They've become a cultural landmark."

Truly great music is timeless,

and when you listen to a great recording by Ella Fitzgerald,

you don't think,

"Oh, that's a wonderful piece of nostalgia that I can just dip into."

I think to myself, "I can't imagine anybody singing like that today."

# And so all else above

# I'm waiting for the man I love

# I love...

# Hey, come on, man

# Come on, man

# Hey, come on, man

# I'm waiting for the man

# Crazy for the man

# I'm waiting for the man

# The man I love... #