Say the word Storyville and you might picture a BBC documentary series, a blues-rock band, a Danish jazz label, a Boston nightclub, or an artisanal coffee company. All of those are correct, and this episode traces how a single proper noun detached from its geography and became a free-floating cultural signifier. It starts in 1897, when a New Orleans city ordinance created a legally sanctioned vice district that the local press mockingly named after alderman Sidney Story, and where segregated Black musicians like Jelly Roll Morton found steady work in parlors and saloons.

When the Navy shut the district down in 1917, the musicians scattered up the Mississippi to Chicago and New York, and the name became a vessel for a spirit rather than a place. We follow it through George Wein's Storyville Records, a Copenhagen label, a British magazine tha ...