Kwame Alexander on Bringing the Free Spirit of Jazz to Young Viewers

In 2010, the poet and novelist Kwame Alexander faced a challenge that is familiar to parents everywhere. His younger daughter, then a year old, wouldn’t stop wailing.

Lullabies failed. Rocking didn’t help, nor did a car ride. Finally, Alexander put on a few records and found the solution: It was jazz, Baby, jazz!

“So I would play her Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald,” he said in a video interview in mid-April. “I would play her bossa nova, and she would stop crying. And I thought: Wow, this is kind of cool. Maybe I should write something about jazz for her.”

The result was “Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band,” Alexander’s first children’s book. But an enterprising rooster doesn’t crow only once, and the author’s feathered, guitar-strumming character has lived on, in a 2021 Kennedy Center stage musical and in three more books. And now Rooster is making his television debut: On Thursday, PBS Kids is premiering “Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band,” a one-hour animated special that Alexander created with the screenwriter Kay Donmyer. (The special is streaming on all PBS digital platforms; check local listings for broadcast times.)

Alexander, 56, is no stranger to TV: He was the showrunner of “The Crossover,” the Disney+ 2023 adaptation of his Newbery Medal-winning middle-grade novel about basketball, which won an Emmy for best young teen series. In “Acoustic Rooster,” he and Donmyer, who collaborated on the script and the lyrics, are presenting a, well, cockier version of the book’s strutting hero.

In the special, Rooster wants to win a jazz band contest, but first he needs to be part of a group. He plans to join the famous Barnyard Band — which has members like “Mules Davis,” “Lil Herdin” and “Ella Finchgerald” (voiced by the jazz singer Dee Daniels) — and help it win the competition by being its undisputed star.