While there's little doubt that appellations such as "the king" or "the greatest" are to a large degree marketing/promotional strategies, my main concern about the "Paul Whiteman- King of Jazz" title and the ODJB claim that they were the creators of jazz, is that lots of folks may believe that without giving attention and credit to those who were the originators of jazz and because of their musical skills and innovations deserve the title of king much more than the person mainstream media promotes.

What I'm saying is that race plays a big factor in who mainstream media promotes and- as Brenda Dixon Gottschild described it-White American continuously takes Black cultural products like jazz and "launders [them] in the appropriation-approximation-assimilation white-wash cycle and are distilled/finessed to a white approved version." I consider Paul Whiteman and ODJB to be the "white washed white approved versions".

My core reason for starting this thread was to give more time (if not equal time) to the consideration and study of African American contributors to jazz which after all is a combination of iAfrican and European music making strategies.*

*I changed the order that Q gave in his latest post to reflect that the fact that the origin of jazz came from Black people and not White people. As to which musical influences is greater-African or European-I know too little about jazz to judge.