Imagine producing a sound as pure as a perfectly cast bell while your entire life falls apart around you. That is the paradox of Leon Bismark Beiderbecke, known as Bix, a self-taught kid from Davenport, Iowa, born in 1903, who replicated theater piano and riverboat calliope tunes by ear as a small child and taught himself cornet by playing along to his brother's early jazz records. This episode explains how his unorthodox fingerings and inability to read music forced him to invent an entirely new musical vocabulary.

The story follows a 1921 scandal that sent him to Lake Forest Academy near Chicago, where he climbed down the fire escape to hear King Oliver on the South Side, his 1924 recordings with the Wolverines, the introverted middle-register lyricism that contrasted with Louis Armstrong, and the architectural logic of his correlated cho ...