This biography charts the life and career of the 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. John Chilton, who knew Eldridge for many years, presents a picture of a fiery yet sensitive individual who never shunned candour, and who was at his happiest when playing the trumpet. New light is shed on the various occasions when Eldridge unwillingly became entangled with gangsters in New York and Chicago, and there are revealing details about Eldridge's uneven working relationship with Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie.