I'm Christopher Leighton, this is open source.

In any argument about who was the most

American musician of the shape-shifting 20th century,

Gershwin, Ellington, Copeland, Miles, Sinatra,

John Cage, maybe Elvis, there's no getting away

from Leonard Bernstein, a giant figure

at the very center of it all.

Mid-1950s, Charlie Parker has died

scandalously young.

Miles and Coltrane are about to record kind of blue.

Duke Ellington is making the best-selling album

of his lifetime at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Leonard Bernstein, not yet 40, has composed

ballets, show songs, and two symphonies.

He's conducting Beethoven at Carnegie Hall,

an opera with Maria Collison Milan.

And in 1955, he is sweating through the birth

of something strange for Broadway,

a Romeo and Juliet story out of Shakespeare,

about gangs in New York.

Dancers enact the warfare to jazz harmonies

and Cuban rhythms.

...