This paper argues that early jazz culture in interwar Constantinople provides a cue to consider the ways that the transnational movement of early jazz engages with the question of aesthetic modernism. Jazz culture—defined as nightlife, music, dance performance, and illustrated print culture that sketch out a new set of social mores, fashions, gender relations, and consumer practices—provides a cue: (1) to consider the parameters of early jazz Turkish criticism, and (2) to establish a specific jazz chronology that allows for revisiting late-Ottoman and early Turkish republican frameworks to the project of republican modernism. Specifically, I understand jazz culture as intersecting with experiences that expands what some scholars call a “transatlantic framing” for reading the meanings and production of modern bodies and practices (Daphne Brooks: 2006). Constantinople’s early jazz scene coalesced during the years surrounding World War One when U.S. amateur musician-sailors joined a circuit of black performers that connected key cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean and continental Europe, highlighting a performance circuit of black artists to the city that began in the mid-nineteenth century. By the occupation period (1918-1923), “Constan Town,” as penned by U.S. writers, captured the city’s emerging 1920s jazz scene. In 1927 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.” This culture was shaped by and reflected the overlapping diasporas and migrations of refugees, musicians, minority communities, many of whom were part of a growing commercial sector of ethnic and foreign entrepreneurs. Drawing upon foreign and Ottoman press, travel narratives, diaries, and visual materials, this paper briefly sketches the early jazz scene of performance and then isolates post-Ottoman observer’s perspective on a jazz of questionable origins, of primitivism and potential savageness, and of something uncomfortably modern. The framing of early jazz and its dances as savage and as ultra-modern carves out a space to consider the relationship between jazz culture, meanings of blackness, and the experience of modernism. “Riffing to the Modern” centers around the central question: how can the constitutive parts of jazz culture help frame a transnational perspective for engaging with early republican modernism that disrupts a chronology of cultural reforms and debates of cultural lacks?