Jazz (Season 1)

Jazz (2001) is a ten-part PBS documentary by Ken Burns you can watch online on iFILM. Over nearly nineteen hours, it traces the music from its roots in late-nineteenth-century New Orleans to the avant-garde of the 1960s — Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, each given sustained attention.

Burns builds each chapter from archival recordings, period photographs, and commentary by Wynton Marsalis, with Keith David narrating throughout. The thread running beneath the music history is that jazz is America's most unfiltered autobiography — every stylistic shift tied to a social rupture, from Jim Crow to the postwar boom. Stream all episodes of Jazz online on iFILM.