In the 1940s bebop demanded blistering speed, and the consensus was that a slide trombone, essentially a long piece of brass plumbing, could not keep up. J.J. Johnson ignored the consensus. This episode traces how James Louis Johnson, born in Indianapolis in 1924, started on piano at nine, which gave him a harmonic, architectural view of chords before he ever touched a trombone at 14. Trumpeter Fats Navarro told him to stop listening to trombonists and model himself on tenor saxophonist Lester Young, and Johnson answered the physics problem by mastering the overtone series and alternate slide positions to minimize how far his arm had to travel.

We follow his first recorded solo on Love for Sale with Benny Carter in 1943, the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in 1944, the Count Basie Orchestra, Dizzy Gillespie declaring him the one elec ...