Jazz recordings are powerful objects. Th e legacy of recorded jazz functions as the backbone of the music’s history and shvapes our understanding of the past. Historically, recordings were crucial to the spread of jazz culture, enabling the music to develop into a global phenomenon. Within the early decades of jazz history, entering the recording studio not only provided musicians with an opportunity to document their music for posterity but also encouraged new ways of working and perceiving performance practice. Th is balance between viewing recordings as a form of historical documentation (capturing music as it would have sounded) and understanding recording as a creative medium (developing sounds that are unique to the studio) points to potential frictions that emerge when jazz is placed on record. Jed Rasula, for example, describes jazz records as a “seductive menace”; they are oxymoronic in that they are, on the one hand, essential to our understanding of the past and, on the other hand, problematic, in that they off er a limited take on the historical process.