‘Jackie’, summers of memorable music
The History Channel presents “After Jackie” (8 p.m. Saturday, TV-14). The documentary special commemorates the 75 years since the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson ended segregation in Major League Baseball.
“After Jackie” also focuses on the next generation of talent, personified by Bill White, Curt Flood and Bob Gibson, who endured racist attitudes well into the 1960s and ’70s. Gibson, one of dominant pitchers of the 1960s for the St. Louis Cardinals, was consigned to housing on “the other side of town” when he attended his earliest spring training camps. He was also subject to prevailing myths that “Black players can’t pitch.” This despite the historical record of Satchel Paige in the old Negro Leagues.
Curt Flood brought the strident attitudes of the civil rights movement to Major League Baseball, challenging the league’s “reserve clause,” a legal practice that allowed teams to treat players like property, something Flood likened to slavery. His challenge came at the expense of his career, but he opened the way to players’ free agency, giving them the ability to negotiate higher salaries at the end of their contracts. This would bring an exponential increase in all players’ salaries from the mid-’70s forward.
“After” also interviews Bill White, a Gold Glove first baseman, better known for his work as an executive and sportscaster, integrating those echelons of the game decades after Jackie Robinson donned a Dodgers uniform. ›
“Juneteenth: A Global Celebration for Freedom” (8 p.m. Sunday, CNN) presents music by the Roots, Earth, Wind and Fire, Mickey Guyton, Robert Glasper, Yolanda Adams, Billy Porter and many more performers. The special’s music directors include Adam Blackstone and Questlove.
Viewers may recall Questlove’s remarkable 2021 documentary “Summer of Soul,” capturing a weeks-long festival of music and Black pride in Harlem in the summer of 1969. Relegated to a cultural footnote in a season long associated with Woodstock — which took place just weeks later —
the music and its moment were revisited after years of research into archival concert films, news coverage and interview footage. “Summer of Soul” streams on Hulu. ›
Want even more music? Co-director Bert Stern used his background as a fashion photographer to capture the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in super-saturated film stock in the 1959 documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” (1:15 p.m. Sunday, TCM, TV-PG). The set list offers a virtual encyclopedia of 20th-century jazz, from traditionalists Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden and Dixieland bands to the more modern sounds of Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan and Eric Dolphy. Rocker Chuck Berry reminds the audience of changes in popular tastes. Scat singer Anita O’Day all but steals the show, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (also in “Summer
of Soul”) closes the proceedings.
Stern’s cameras also capture a genteel yet hip audience representing a golden age of American style, a kind of effortless, unaffected chic that has since inspired generations of designers. One of the greatest concert movies ever made as well as a fashion time capsule, it evokes summer in all its intoxicating ripeness. A classic. ›
Set in the explosive political tumult of the early 1970s, the eighth season of “Endeavor” on “Masterpiece” (9 p.m. Sunday, PBS, TV-14, check local listings) will be the last for this Oxford-based murder mystery.
As fans doubtless know, “Endeavor” offers a prequel to the “Inspector Morse” series, which ran from 1987 to 2000.