The Story of Jazz: Bop and Beyond

John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman - some of the names that brought jazz out of the age of bebop and into the present. As the medium matured in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, an intense flowering of new styles spawned almost as many forms - free jazz, West Coast cool, hard bop, modal jazz, fusion - as musicians. All these strains come together to demonstrate that, with all the variety, one constant remains: jazz, the vibrant, living art form, is thriving.