In the late 1930s a broke man swept floors at a recreation hall in Savannah, Georgia, having pawned his custom suits to buy a meal. A little over a decade earlier he had been musical royalty, the architect of modern jazz and the mentor who taught Louis Armstrong. This episode explores the rise and rapid fall of Joseph Nathan Oliver, from a disputed birth year in rural Louisiana and early trombone studies, through the loud, dangerous dance halls of Storyville, to the 1918 move to Chicago where he sped up the music to match an industrial city.

We look at King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens with Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, Lil Hardin, and a young Armstrong on second cornet, the 1923 acoustic recording sessions where Armstrong’s lungs knocked the needle off the wax, and the household mutes, from plungers to derby hats, that birthed the wah-wah sound. Then we trace the business miscalculations, including holding out on a Cotton Club offer that went to Duke Ellington, the sugar sandwiches that destroyed his gums and embouchure, and a Depression bank collapse that wiped out his savings before his death in 1938.

• Why an entire band could be arrested when a Storyville brawl broke out
• How the Great Migration and Chicago factory pace changed the tempo of jazz
• White musicians standing on the sidewalk outside a segregated venue to decode his sound
• The biomechanics of why degenerating gums end a cornet player’s career
• Armstrong’s conviction that jazz would not exist as we know it without Papa Joe