In 1927, and as a product of wartime migration, African-American trombonist and composer Earl B. Granstaff who had performed before U.S. and Turkish dignitaries in Constantinople remarked to a New York Amsterdam News correspondent that black musicians were “occupying more and higher positions in Constantinople than in any other place.” The city’s early jazz scene coalesced during the years surrounding World War One when amateur and trained musicians (sailors and refugees) shuffled to or docked in the city. Of note, Granstaff’s reference to a black performance circuit, which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century, alludes to the circulation of early jazz as following “different routes as opposed to roots,” (McCay, 2005). The signifying difference between roots and routes appeals to the question of dominant historical narratives in the field of Turkish studies as well as jazz studies. Turkish historiographies of jazz are virtually non-existent although the word – caz – appeared in Ottoman Turkish print in the 1920s. Yet, the auditory culture of jazz as a globally shared experience allows for the integration of different theoretical frameworks and regional historiographies that place Constantinople in a larger transcultural dialogue around jazz culture. I define jazz culture broadly, as places where nightlife, music, dance performance, and illustrated print culture collide with newspaper reportage, scientific discourses on health and the body, and policing. There is an unevenness of jazz culture and its auditory practices—understandings of it, participation in, and access to—, which makes space for creative possibilities and expressions, reactions and responses undergirding what was a vibrant post-Ottoman debate of political, socioeconomic, and cultural manifestations at the ground level. This paper brings together texts and theories whose discursive formation and regimes of representation overlap, in order to show how the auditory culture informed the material and symbolic borders in Constantinople’s district of Beyoğlu, and how its multiethnic and foreign elements combined to mark the district as transgressive. By peopling Istanbul’s district of Beyoğlu with travelling jazz musicians, musician-refugees, and amateur musician-soldiers, the paper speaks to the complexities of urban racial, sexual and spatial reordering in the post-Armistice period. By uniquely combining Turkish press accounts and novellas with White Russian, African-American and U.S. Navy press, memoirs, and travel itineraries reveals previously unexplored modes of difference making, creative expression, and nation making not only for denizens of the city but also for marginalized transient populations. [390 words]