Once the Dixieland revival found an audience in the 1940s, the monolithic façade of swing began to splinter into the interest groups that have populated the subsequent history of jazz: bop, cool, third stream, free jazz, fusion, neo-traditionalist. Jazz as music is inseparable from the African-American experience, and Duke Ellington rightly insisted that ‘the Negro is the creative voice of America, is creative America’ (Tucker 1993, 147). The question of the jazz audience, on the other hand, encompasses amore indeterminate populace. One could approach the topic of audience by offering a demographic profile of various constituencies of fans, but this would lend tacit assent to consumerism as validating criterion. There was an audience for jazz before there were consumers, in part because ‘the Jazz Age was born … almost before there was jazz’ (Schiff 1997, 87). ‘Jazz’ was initially so mercurial a term that it was applied to music intermittently: the audience responded to a social spectrum in which music was only a part. None the less, historians have gravitated to the narrative magnetism of giants shaping the music to their personal visions, and 1923 is often cited as an inaugural moment because it marks the first recordings of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet and Bessie Smith. Gunther Schuller even refers to a ‘pre-1923 era’ (1968, 71). But if we de-prioritise recordings, a significant fact appears: jazz had already had a worldwide impact before 1923.