With Langston Hughes as tour guide, this chapter sounds the (ostensible) paradox of jazz abroad: on one hand, jazz has often been perceived as indubitably, authentically “Black,” a racially encoded expression. On the other hand, jazz’s inherent multivalences oscillate on transnational frequencies that have resonated and continue to resonate with all kinds of people all over the world. The story of jazz abroad, then, is also the story of Blackness on the move, a journey perpetually navigating a course between authenticity and hybridity, individuation and polyvocality, originality and imitation. This jazz dialectic amplifies Blackness as a floating signifier and allows for the performance of fluid, transnational identities that defy homogenizing taxonomies of race, class, culture, or nationhood. And so, jazz– and jazz abroad especially– is (paradoxically) both, a distinctly Black American art form, and at the same time world music long before we had a term for it.

Al Casey talks about his work independently from Fats Waller, including his love for other guitarists such as Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. He talks about working with pianist Art Tatum, an experience shared with bassist Truck Parham. Casey then goes on to describe his trio which accompanied Billie Holiday and others who worked with her add their experiences, including Doc Cheatham and Mal Waldron. There follows a dicsussion of Teddy Wilson's short-lived big band that worked at the Golden Gate in New York, analysing its press coverage and why it ultimately failed. The chapter finished with Truck Parham's vivid memory of the death of bandleader Jimmie Lunceford (who will be referred to numerous times in later chapters) as the result of a racist incident in a restaurant.

Given the increasingly important role that music, especially jazz, played in the American literary soundscape, my second chapter explores two instances of jazz autobiography: Alan Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (1950) and Sidney Bechet’s Treat It Gentle (1960). Through my analysis, I reveal the critical intervention of Zora Neale Hurston in shaping the practices of transcription so that the voices represented on the page adhere to the “laws of sound.” While the tendency has been to read Lomax and Bechet’s books in the context of popular jazz autobiography, I argue that the avant-garde nature of their transcription practices warrant their consideration alongside more canonical works of modernist prose. These books are not oral histories but rather aural histories that require readers to think critically about the sonic identities of musicians who themselves experimented with recording technology.

Among the most notorious outlaws in the history of New Orleans is a runaway slave who lost an arm in a skirmish with the police, through which he earned the nickname that means “severed arm.” His career is visible in detail in the historical record but migrated into folklore and, in turn, literary works of various kinds, ultimately to form the basis of Sidney Bechet’s vision of the origins of jazz. Many supposed that he had supernatural powers, and his exploits as an entertainer in Congo Square in the antebellum period are the basis, for Bechet, of the expressive traditions that ultimately took shape as the city’s most significant cultural contribution to the world.