Although novelists, film-makers and photographers are likely to rely upon familiar myths when they create images of jazz, they can also bring new life to a music that can be opaque, even to the initiated. As David Yaffe has argued, a novelist such as Ralph Ellison can surpass both musicologists and critics when, for example, he links Louis Armstrong's music with his metaphor of invisibility: ‘Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around’ (Ellison 1952, 8). In Ellison's metaphors, Yaffe hears a definition of swing more convincing than one based on empirical data or formal analysis. At their best, fiction, cinema and photography produce illuminating, often startling representations of jazz through different sets of metaphors appropriate to the history and aesthetics of each medium. In hopes of identifying these metaphors and how they function, I devote special attention to ‘tutor texts’ that facilitate a long view of jazz within specific art forms. Although these texts may not be the most canonical, they may be the most representative. I begin with a book that sums up how images of jazz were presented during the twentieth century.