 In the beginning, he was a sound, and only a sound, a strange blend of happy cacophony and tormented caterwauling. Nothing like it had been heard before, not in New Orleans, where he was born in 1901, or Chicago, or St. Louis, where he played as an emerging virtuoso cornetist, and certainly not in New York, where Duke Ellington said of his first exposure to that sound, nobody had ever heard anything like it.