In 1964 an actual write-in presidential campaign proposed renaming the White House the Blues House, making Miles Davis director of the CIA, and naming Malcolm X attorney general. It was run by Dizzy Gillespie, and the merchandise money quietly funded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This episode looks past the puffed cheeks, beret, and bent trumpet to the harmonic theoretician, teacher, diplomat, and spiritual seeker underneath. Born in Cheraw, South Carolina, in 1917, the youngest of nine, he taught himself trombone and trumpet by 12 after hearing Roy Eldridge on the radio and landed in Cab Calloway's orchestra, where his flat ninths and passing chords were dismissed as Chinese music until the 1941 spitball incident ended with a knife and his firing.

The episode f ...