The purpose here is at once simple and complex – to show that both academic and popular perceptions of the origins of jazz are wide of the mark, though still sustained by both scholarly and musical communities. On a very general level jazz is construed as a quintessentially Afro—American music form that originated in widely disparate locales across the United States at roughly the same time, and perhaps the only indigenous American art form of world significance. My purpose is not to challenge this vague characterisation in all its particulars, but to elaborate upon a query occasionally broached in social history, namely – what kind of society could have produced the phenomenon of pre-recorded jazz music? I shall suggest that in its early stages, during the late nineteenth century, jazz could not be accurately characterised as even ‘American’.