RE: King, queen, duke, jazz, blues, ragtime, calypso – why do you think we call them record labels? Product – package – consumer…, overpriced textbooks and sheepskins being perhaps the majority component of blues & jazz consumerism for the last several decades.

I wouldn't recommend Wald, or this thread, for an understanding of Paul Whiteman's relationship with jazz. As opposed to the consumer's relationship with jazz... just to be clear.

He was the product of an upper-middle class Colorado home & music education and started recording for Victor just six years after he joined the SF Symphony.

His local popular music influences, in the interim, would have trended more towards Charles N. Daniels; Emil Breitenfeld; Grant Falkenstein; vaudeville and late-period, transitional minstrelsy.

If one does not require genre/race-specific “improvisational and emotional depth,” this will do fine for the beginnings of West Coast jazz, otherwise you gots to wait another half century for Breitenfeld 2.0 and his pal Brubeck. Alas, nada on the former subjects in Wald, or anywhere else ftm, when the subject of Whiteman's style of jazz comes around.

Falkenstein didn't try Hollywood, pretty much everybody else did. It's a common thread in the biographies. It split the 'House of Moret' in two, North-South, old-new media. Whiteman vocalist Bing Crosby went on to lead both industries in recording tech for much of his own career.