Warren Baby Dodds helped invent modern drumming, yet his most famous 1920s recordings capture him tapping a woodblock because acoustic recording horns could not handle a bass drum. This episode follows the New Orleans pioneer from a lard-can drum with chair rungs for sticks, through street parades and funeral processions, to Fate Marable’s riverboat band on the Mississippi alongside a teenage Louis Armstrong.

The conversation covers his move to Chicago and King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, the toxic rivalry with his strict clarinetist brother Johnny, the origin of the shimmy beat, the smooth press roll that became the DNA of swing, and his lifelong refusal to use a hi-hat. It then traces the 1940s New Orleans jazz revival, the electric microphone recordings for Folkways and Circle that finally captured his full kit, his 1948 European tour and the Nice Jazz Festival, the strokes that ended his playing, and his 2010 Downbeat Hall of Fame induction.

• Why early drummers were human metronomes inherited from marching bands
• How New Orleans funeral marches taught him to direct a crowd’s energy
• The physics of why a bass drum knocked the stylus out of the wax groove
• Louis Armstrong on why the shimmy alone was worth the price of admission
• Why seated, silent European audiences felt like an insult to the rhythm