A sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet. This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America. What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like so many black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries not by waging war over every slight, which never would have worked in that Jim Crow era, but by opening America’s eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement.