Jazz for Young People: What Is New Orleans Jazz?

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4 @ 8:00PM & 11:00PM

Famed trumpeter and Jazz at Lincoln Center Director Wynton Marsalis returns to his hometown of New Orleans for this entertaining lesson about New Orleans Jazz. Wynton and his band talk about the roots of Jazz and demonstrate the various forms of Jazz. LPB taped this special in April at the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center.

Episode 4: Ages of Gold

Thursday, December 3 @ 8:00pm & 11:00pm

Episode Four is the story of India in the Middle Ages. At the time of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, and the European Dark Ages, India had a series of great flowerings of culture, both in the north and the south. In this episode Michael Wood shows us some of the amazing achievements of medieval India: In astronomy they discovered the heliocentric universe, zero and the circumference of the earth.

They mastered the world’s first large scale wrought iron technology—the Delhi iron pillar, and their courtly culture was the setting the world’s first sex manual, the Kama Sutra.

Meanwhile in the south the rising power of the Cholan empire spread Indian arms and culture to the Maldives, Sri Lanka, the Andamans, and to Java and the Malay peninsula, where the Tamil diaspora is still powerful today.

Wood visits the Cholan capital at Tanjore, and with extraordinarily privileged access takes us right inside the greatest temple of that time (founded in 1010), to see the ancient rituals still being performed.

Cholan temple, Tanjore

In a fascinating sequence we see traditional bronze casters, making religious images for the temples, just as their ancestors did 1500 years ago.

We visit a traditional Tamil family in the temple city of Chidambaram, go with them on pilgrimage and witness the ancient mountain top festival of fire that was already famous in 700AD!

The story ends in Multan in Pakistan in the early eleventh century with a shadow on the horizon—the first invasions by Turks and Afghans bearing the Muslim faith that will change the story of India and turn the subcontinent into the biggest Muslim civilization in the world.

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The Magic Flute

Wednesday, December 2 @ 10:00pm

Three ladies in the service of the Queen of the Night save the fainting Prince Tamino from a serpent (”A serpent! A monster!”). When they leave to tell the queen, the bird catcher Papageno bounces in and boasts to Tamino that it was he who killed the creature (”I’m Papageno”). The ladies return to give Tamino a portrait of the queen’s daughter, Pamina, who they say is enslaved by the evil Sarastro, and they padlock Papageno’s mouth for lying. Tamino falls in love with Pamina’s face in the portrait (”This portrait’s beauty”). The queen, appearing in a burst of thunder, is grieving the loss of her daughter; she charges Tamino with Pamina’s rescue (”My fate is grief”). The ladies give a magic flute to Tamino and silver bells to Papageno to ensure their safety, appointing three spirits to guide them (”Hm! hm! hm! hm!”).

Sarastro’s slave Monostatos pursues Pamina (”You will not dare escape”), but is frightened away by the feather-covered Papageno, who tells Pamina that Tamino loves her and intends to save her. Led by the three spirits to the Temple of Sarastro, Tamino is advised by a high priest that it is the queen, not Sarastro, who is evil. Hearing that Pamina is safe, Tamino charms the animals with his flute, then rushes to follow the sound of Papageno’s pipes. Monostatos and his cohorts chase Papageno and Pamina, but are left helpless by Papageno’s magic bells. Sarastro, entering in great ceremony (”Long life to Sarastro”), promises Pamina eventual freedom and punishes Monostatos. Pamina is enchanted by a glimpse of Tamino, who is led into the temple with Papageno.

Sarastro tells his priests that Tamino will undergo initiation rites (”O Isis and Osiris”). Monostatos tries to kiss the sleeping Pamina (”Men were born to be great lovers”); he is discovered by the Queen of the Night, who dismisses him. She gives her daughter a dagger with which to murder Sarastro (”Here in my heart, Hell’s bitterness”).

The weeping Pamina is confronted and consoled by Sarastro (”Within our sacred temple”). Tamino and Papageno are told by a priest that they must remain silent and refrain from eating, a vow that Papageno immediately breaks when he takes a glass of water from a flirtatious old lady. The old lady vanishes when he asks her name. The three spirits appear to guide Tamino through the rest of his journey and to tell Papageno to be quiet. Tamino remains silent even when Pamina appears, which breaks her heart since she cannot understand his reticence (”Now my heart is filled with sadness”).

The priests inform Tamino that he has only two more trials to complete his initiation (”Why, beloved, must we part?”). Papageno longs for a cuddly wife, but settles for the old lady. When he promises to be faithful, she turns into a young Papagena but soon disappears.

After many dangers, Pamina and Tamino are reunited and face the ordeals of water and fire protected by the magic flute.

Papageno is saved from attempting suicide by the spirits who remind him that if he uses his magic bells he will find true happiness. When he does, Papagena reappears and the two plan for the future and move into a bird’s nest (”Pa-pa-pa …”). The Queen of the Night, her three ladies, and Monostatos attack the temple, but are defeated and banished. Sarastro joins Pamina and Tamino as the people hail Isis, Osiris, and the triumph of courage, virtue, and wisdom.
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Woody Guthrie: Ain’t got no home

SATURDAY, MARCH 16 @ 7:00PM

He was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, on July 14, 1912, 12 days after the Democrats nominated his namesake for the presidency of the United States.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie — “Woody” almost immediately — was Charley Guthrie’s son and like his father ever the optimist. He was Nora’s son too, hers the gift of old songs, and a dreadful fear he would inherit her madness.

Together they raised Woody, his two brothers and two sisters in a middle-class, foredoomed home the neighbors judged one of the finest in that farming community turned oil boom town.

Life in Okemah might have been comfortable, with cotton prices up and beef down, but for the fires.

Fire was to dog Woody, boy and man. A kerosene lamp shattered – the OKEMAH LEDGER reported it as an accident, while folks in town whispered otherwise – and flames consumed his beloved older sister Clara, the one who called him “Woodblock,” when the boy was just months shy of his seventh birthday

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Episode 3:

Spice Routes & Silk Roads

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 30 @ 8:00pm & 11:00pm

The next episode in the story of India takes us to the early centuries CE, the time of the Roman Empire in the west, and to “the happiest time in the history of the world” as the historian Edward Gibbon put it.

In this period, located at the “center of world” India became a great player in the first global economy. As the spice routes and the silk roads opened up, Indian civilization grew, enriched by contact and exchange. Beginning in Kerala, Michael Wood journeys on an old wooden sailing boat plying its trade from South India to the Gulf, and tells how the spice trade with Rome opened India up to the world as well as giving us a recipe for dormouse stuffed with peppercorns!

He finds the lost site of the greatest Roman trading port, samples the earliest cuisine of India and travels by train to the great ancient capital of South India, Madurai.

The film then shows how north India was opened up to the world at the same time, as merchant’s caravans began to use the Silk Route between China and the West.

Kushan ruins of the earliest living city in the whole of South Asia, in Peshawar, Pakistan

Journeying out to Merv in the deserts of Turkmenistan, Wood tells the story of the forgotten empire of the Kushans that ruled India in the first centuries CE: one of the greatest and least known empires in history whose story can only now be told with the recent decipherment of their language.

Coming down the Khyber to Peshawar in Pakistan Wood finds the remains of what was then the greatest building in the world and traveling on to Mathura tells the amazing story of one of India’s greatest rulers who opened up India to the world and laid the foundations of medieval India-only to be overthrown in his own capital.
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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 @ 7:00pm & 10:00PM

On New Year’s Eve, 1938, columnist Walter Winchell published his annual list of the year’s top ten newsmakers. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was among those mentioned. So was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The tenth spot, however, went to a horse. Seabiscuit was dung-colored and boxy, with stumpy legs that wouldn’t completely straighten, a straggly tail and an ungainly gait, but though he didn’t look the part, he was one of the most remarkable thoroughbred racehorses in history.

Seabiscuit’s fame was unexpected. Overworked and underachieving, Seabiscuit had been struggling in horse racing’s minor leagues for the first three years of his life. But then Tom Smith, a taciturn, West Coast trainer and Red Pollard, a beat-up, failing jockey, turned the horse’s career around. Smith spotted him first and recognized his raw, untapped power. Pollard, whose undistinguished riding history had given him plenty of experience with mistreated and troubled mounts, knew how to ride him. Together, Pollard and Smith startled the racing establishment, turning out a tremendous athlete who became an overnight winner in race after race.

In the 1930s, when Americans longed to escape the grim realities of Depression era, Seabiscuit became a working man’s hero. “For a brief moment in America, says Laura Hillenbrand, author of the best-selling Seabiscuit, a little brown racehorse wasn’t just a little brown racehorse. He was the proxy for a nation.”  At the height of his career, Seabiscuit became a national obsession. His name was used to sell everything from oranges to hotels, from ladies’  hats to dry-cleaning services. Tens of thousands of fans swarmed to the racetracks just to see him work out.

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MUMBAI MASSACRE

THURSDAY, MARCH 21 @ 10:00pm

Mumbai, November 26, 2008. What began as a typical day in a bustling, cosmopolitan city turned into a horror-filled 60 hours of orchestrated chaos when terrorists infiltrated the city and rampaged through the train station, cafes, a Jewish center and two of India’s most famous five- star hotels. As police struggled to coordinate a response and journalists clamored to cover the story from the streets, victims trapped inside the hotels began making contact with the outside world using cell phones, text messages and Twitter. Their urgent and heart-wrenching messages begged for information and painted a gruesome picture of indiscriminate killing, unfettered brutality and mass confusion. But the victims weren’t the only ones communicating with the outside world. The terrorist leaders in Pakistan were watching the coverage of the attacks on the news and relaying crucial information about the whereabouts of the victims back to their operatives on the ground.

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What are Dreams?

November 24 @ 6:00pm & 9:00pm

What are dreams and why do we have them? NOVA joins leading dream researchers as they embark on a variety of neurological and psychological experiments to investigate the world of sleep and dreams. Delving deep into the thoughts and brains of a variety of dreamers, scientists are asking important questions about the purpose of this mysterious realm we escape to at night. Do dreams allow us to get a good night’s sleep? Do they improve memory? Do they allow us to be more creative? Can they solve our problems or even help us survive the hazards of everyday life?
NOVA follows a number of scientists, including Matthew Wilson of MIT, who is literally “eavesdropping” on the dreams of rats, and other investigators who are systematically analyzing the content of thousands of human dreams. From people who violently act out their dreams to those who can’t stop their nightmares, from sleepwalking cats to the rare instances of individuals who don’t seem to ever dream, each fascinating case study contains a vital clue to the age-old question: What Are Dreams?

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