A four-year-old plays a piano recital flawlessly, then deliberately hits the wrong final note just to hear what it sounds like. Instead of scolding her, her teacher tells her parents to move her to the violin. That child was Regina Carter, and this episode follows her journey from Suzuki-method ear training at the Detroit Community Music School to a MacArthur Fellowship, exploring how she fused rigid classical technique with the improvisational freedom of jazz to redefine what a violin can do.

We look at her double life in Detroit, playing in the youth division of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and attending master classes with Itzhak Perlman and Yehudi Menuhin by day while playing pop-funk in a band called Brainstorm by night, and how a friend at Cass Tech introduced her to Ella Fitzgerald. The conversation covers her decision to leave the ...