A Wharton graduate and an advertising professional take over a French Quarter music venue and impose three rules on day one: no advertising, no alcohol, and no microphones or amplifiers. By every conventional metric it should have failed within a month. Instead it became Preservation Hall, a global sanctuary for traditional New Orleans jazz that now draws roughly 180,000 visitors a year. This episode traces the accidental origins of the space, from art dealer Larry Borenstein paying elderly jazz pioneers to rehearse inside his gallery as an audio billboard, to the moment audiences literally turned their backs on the paintings to face the band.

We follow the arrival of newlyweds Alan and Sandra Jaffe in the fall of 1961, why a tuba-playing business graduate recognized the scarcity value that the commercial world was overlooking, and how the  ...