Chick Webb reached the pinnacle of jazz drumming while living with a badly deformed spine, constant pain, and no ability to read a single note of sheet music. Born in Baltimore to William and Marie Webb, with a birth year that sources place anywhere from 1905 to 1909, he fell down a flight of stairs as an infant, crushing vertebrae, and the injury progressed into Pott's disease, tuberculosis of the spine, which left him hunchbacked and short-statured. A doctor suggested he play an instrument to loosen his stiffened bones, so he sold newspapers on Baltimore street corners to buy his first drum kit and was playing professionally by age 11.

This episode follows Webb to New York at 17, lessons with Tommy Benford, leading his own Harlem band by 1926, and becoming the house band at the Savoy Ballroom in 1931, where he conducted a 15-piece orchest ...