The audience at Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924 included composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Ernest Bloch, conductors Walter Damrosch and Leopold Stokowski, violinists Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler … well, you get the picture. The cream of the New York musical society. They'd all assembled to join Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra in what Whiteman called "an experiment" … an attempt to prove whether one band could excel in both jazz and classical music.

The experiment opened with the song "Livery Stable Blues" a naive early jazz number that Whiteman intended as an object lesson for his highbrow audience. You see, he thought the piece demonstrated the embarrassing origins of jazz. But, to his dismay, the audience loved it. "I had the panicky feeling," he later admitted, "that they were applauding the thing … on its merits."

The concert ended with a familiar classical warhorse, a "Pomp and Circumstance" march by Sir Edward Elgar. Just before the march, the 25-year-old George Gershwin, by then a famous Tin Pan Alley songwriter, went public with his first concert work. This is what the literati had come to hear … "Rhapsody in Blue".

"American Mavericks" is a thirteen episode series on American composers who broke with European tradition to innovate a pure sound. The series won a Peabody Award in 2003.