In the spring of 1936 at the Reno Club in Kansas City, a young Charlie Parker lost the chord changes during a jam session, and the drummer unbolted a cymbal and hurled it across the stage at his feet. Everyone remembers the story as the moment that drove Parker to practice until he became a genius. Almost nobody remembers the man who threw the cymbal. This episode is about that drummer, Jonathan David Samuel Jones, known as Jo Jones and later Papa Jo, who lived from 1911 to 1985 and whose legacy rests on a contradiction: a famously combative temper paired with some of the lightest, most fluid rhythms in the history of jazz.

We trace his multidisciplinary foundation, from a Chicago birth and an Alabama childhood to proficiency on saxophone and piano, plus years on the 1920s carnival circuit as both a drummer and a tap dancer. That background ...