In the summer of 1950, Lionel Hampton parading through the infield of Wrigley Field in Los Angeles playing Flying Home drove 14,000 people into a near riot. This deep dive explains how a kid born in Louisville in 1908, raised across Birmingham, Kenosha, and Chicago during the Great Migration, and barred from the Boy Scouts by segregation, found a side door through the Bud Billiken Club and the Chicago Defender Newsboys Band, then turned a novelty instrument into a serious jazz voice after playing one of Louis Armstrong's own solos back to him on the vibraphone in 1930.

The episode covers his role in the Benny Goodman Quartet, one of the first racially integrated jazz groups to perform publicly, and the real danger of touring segregated America. It then follows his own big band, managed with ferocity by his wife Gladys, the 1942 recording of ...