A biography of the spectacular trumpeter, Roy Little Jazz Eldridge, whose style is universally recognised as the all-important link between the playing of Louis Armstrong and the achievements of modernist, Dizzy Gillespie. The indignities he experienced and overcame during the 1940s while working in otherwise all-white ensembles proved he was as bold a social pioneer as he was a performer. New light is shed on the various occasions when he unwillingly became entangled with gangsters, his uneven working relationships and the hurdles he had to overcome when working in all-white ensembles.