Toots Thielemans I hear him." During an interview in 1988, he recalled, "I guess I was born at the right time to live and adapt and be touched by the evolution in the jazz language." In 1949 he joined a jam session in Paris with Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Max Roach and others. He first heard the faster bebop style of jazz from records by Parker and Dizzy Gillespie after they had reached Belgium after the war. They became his musical "prophets." As his small collection of jazz records grew, the music of Benny Goodman and Lester Young began to
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