Vocalese is the art of writing lyrics to every note of a pre-existing instrumental jazz recording, then singing all the horn parts with human voices. This deep dive tells the 96-year story of the man who turned that impossible task into a genre: Jon Hendricks, born in Toledo, Ohio in 1921 into a family of 14 children, whose pastor father and hospitable mother made their home a stopover for touring jazz musicians, and whose neighbor was the piano prodigy Art Tatum.

The episode follows Hendricks from teenage radio gigs that fed a household of 17 during the Depression, through a harrowing World War II chapter in which he and fellow Black soldiers were fired upon by white American military police in France, deserted, survived on the black market, and were court-martialed. It then traces the near-miss law career derailed by expired GI Bill benefits, the Toledo night Charlie Parker told him to move to New York, and the desperate 1958 multitrack sessions that produced Sing a Song of Basie and launched Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

• How growing up near Art Tatum wired a child’s ear for advanced harmony before he learned nursery rhymes
• The wartime desertion and military stockade that nearly ended his relationship with music
• Why a 50-person professional choir could not swing, and how reel-to-reel overdubbing solved the problem
• His 1960s crossover: a UK number-one for Georgie Fame, San Francisco bills with the Grateful Dead, and a move to London to protect his children
• Later honors including arts committees under three presidents, lecturing at the Sorbonne, and finishing a 50-year Miles Davis vocalese project before his death in 2017