In the good old 1960s, the Bohemian life was cheap in lower Manhattan and artists could afford to live there by doing things like driving cabs. Composer Steve Reich, for example.

Reich had been experimenting with recordings of interesting voices and so had the idea of rigging up his cab with a tape recorder in order to record some of his passengers. One day, he recorded a young African-American man who'd been beaten up in the Harlem riots of 1964. By the young man's account, the police who'd been taking victims to the hospital, would only take people who were visibly bleeding. This young man wasn't bleeding, so, as he said, "I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them."

"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.