A young Dizzy Gillespie once heard the 1939 recording Hot Mallets on the radio and was convinced the trumpet solo was his own. It was Roy Eldridge. This episode traces ‘Little Jazz’ from Pittsburgh, where his mother’s death when he was 11 sent him into marathon bedroom practice sessions, modeling his trumpet on saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter rather than Louis Armstrong, and landing a gig by replicating Hawkins’s solo on The Stampede.

We follow his expulsion in ninth grade, running away at 16 to a traveling show, a racist incident in Maryland that sent him home, Count Basie’s praise, the stage name Roy Elliott, and his 1938 attempt to quit music for radio engineering. Then come his 1941 seat in Gene Krupa’s orchestra as one of the first Black permanent members of a white big band, Rockin’ Chair, Krupa’s fistfight over a restaurant, Artie Shaw’s diner story, the Minton’s Playhouse jam sessions, and his refusal to embrace the bebop he inspired.

• Why he removed the caps from his trumpet valves to play faster
• How relying on his ear instead of sight-reading shaped his sound
• The physics of playing saxophone phrasing on a three-valve horn
• Why Gillespie called him ‘the messiah of our generation’ and Eldridge rejected the bridge label
• Playing high notes after a 1970 stroke, his 1980 heart attack, and death in 1989