Jazz is a 2000 documentary miniseries, directed by Ken Burns. It was broadcast on PBS in 2001, and was released on DVD and VHS in January 2, 2001 later that year by the same company. Its chronological and thematic episodes provided a history of the jazz emphasizing innovative composers and musicians and American history.  Swing musicians Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are the central figures, "providing the narrative thread around which the stories of other major figures turn"; several episodes discussed the later contributions of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to bebop, and of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane to free and cool jazz. Nine episodes surveyed forty-five years (1917–1961), leaving the final episode to cover forty years (1961–2001). The documentary examines the impacts of racial segregation and drugs on jazz.