Jazz standard and Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train" (1941). With the big bands struggling to keep going during World War II, a shift was happening in jazz in favor of smaller groups. Some swing era musicians, such as Louis Jordan, later found popularity in a new kind of music, called "rhythm and blues", that would evolve into rock and roll in the 1950s. Bebop emerged in the early 1940s, with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk leading the way. It appealed to a more specialized audiences than earlier forms of jazz, with sophisticated harmonies, fast tempos and often virtuoso musicianship.
Jazz (TV series) central figures, "providing the narrative thread around which the stories of other major figures turn", among them Sidney Bechet, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. A number of companion CDs were released simultaneously. Each two-hour episode of the ten episodes of "Jazz" covered a different era. "Jazz" was nominated for several awards, including multiple Emmy Awards. Among the critics with a positive response, Charles Paul Freund wrote that "Jazz" "is filled with rewards, many of them proffered unintentionally... Burns's documentary gifts are not visionary, analytical, nor even properly historical. Rather, he is a