In the summer of 1914, a teenage soda jerk who could not yet read music composed a single tune by ear and disguised it as a one-step, a waltz, a tango and a foxtrot so cafe customers thought he had an endless repertoire. That resourceful kid was Edward Kennedy Ellington. This episode charts his path from a middle-class Washington, D.C. household where his mother played parlor songs and his Navy blueprint-maker father preferred opera, through the elegance and racial pride his mother Daisy instilled as armor against Jim Crow, to the pool room where ragtime pianists finally made him fall in love with the piano he had been skipping lessons on.

We follow his street-level education, including watching Atlantic City pianists read sheet music upside down, his sign-painting business that doubled as a booking agency, the discouraging early years hustling pool and playing rent parties in Harlem, and the 1927 Cotton Club gig King Oliver turned down. The hosts weigh the Irving Mills contract and its 45 percent cut against the national radio broadcasts that carried sophisticated Black music into living rooms nationwide, then examine how Ellington wrote for specific human voices like Bubber Miley and Johnny Hodges, his partnership with Billy Strayhorn, the long-form ambitions of Black, Brown and Beige, the 1956 Newport comeback and Paul Gonsalves’s 27 choruses, the studio-doctored live album, the Anatomy of a Murder score, the Sacred Concerts, and his preference for the phrase beyond category.

• How manners and dignity functioned as protection for a Black child in early 1900s D.C.
• Vertical integration at a grassroots level: painting the dance poster, then booking the band
• The paradox of a segregated Cotton Club broadcasting Black excellence across America
• Why Ellington played the people, not the instruments, and what Strayhorn’s classical training added
• The truth behind the Newport 1956 album and its 1999 unaltered release