Jazz is one of America’s great gifts to world culture. In this program, Oscar-winning actor and music enthusiast, Morgan Freeman tells the story of jazz’s varied and sometimes challenging postwar history. After the musical revolution of bebop in the 1940s there came an even more challenging style, free jazz, formulated by Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s; concurrently, John Coltrane took Miles Davis’s experiments with ‘modal jazz’ and made them his own. During the 1960s, sax-player Charles Lloyd led one of the most popular jazz combos in the world. We see him here playing with an Indian tabla player. Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, also showcased, played highly influential roles in developing ‘jazz-fusion’ in the late 1960s. Shorter, one of the true saxophone greats, co-founded Weather Report in the 1970s; while Hancock sold over a million albums with his band Headhunters, and has since been sampled by many rappers. More recently, the jazz flag has been flown by an array of musicians including pianist Brad Mehldau and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.