Jazz in 1959 splits away from bebop's dense chord changes toward looser, more open forms, and four albums released that year mark the break: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come. The film uses archive performance footage to place each record in its moment, then turns to musicians who lived through it. Jimmy Cobb, the last surviving member of Davis's band, talks through the Kind of Blue sessions, and Brubeck's drummer Joe Morello covers the odd time signatures that made Time Out unlikely radio hits. Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden speak to the harmolodic freedom that made The Shape of Jazz to Come sound alien to some critics on release. Herbie Hancock and Lou Reed appear among later musicians tracing what each record changed. The film ties the music to a country about to hit its own racial and social upheavals, arguing jazz got there first.