In 1914, Karl K. Kitchen wrote of the district of Beyoğlu’s diverse nighttime performance schedule (Kitchen, 1914). Just a few years later 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.” Although Granstaff’s comment addresses the post-Armistice realities, he references a performance circuit that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century and that highlighted black artists. Istanbul was connected to the wartime and post-wartime landscape as a recipient of artists who were forced to leave other impacted European capitals as exemplified by the minstrel artists cum early jazz musicians George Duncan and Billy Brooks, who reported on this transoceanic network of performers. Notably, Beyoğlu’s European-styled theaters offered venues for touring cakewalk dancers and plantation revues, such as the duo Bonny and Freeman and lieder singer Arabella Fields. These performers were part of a transnational circuit of exchange and participation as part of the city’s transportation, commercial and technology endemic to its port environment that had been catering to the growth of a commercial cosmopolitan network that Kitchen references in 1914. Drawing upon a range of sources including foreign and Ottoman press, travel narratives, diaries, and visual materials, this paper plots Istanbul and post-Ottoman writers on a transnational latitude and in dialogue with other cities, e.g., Cairo, Alexandria, New York City, Berlin. In the aftermath of World War One, Istanbul took in a confluence of people ranging from U.S. navy soldiers patrolling “Turkish Waters” to foreign visitors, from refugees to relief workers, from circuit performers of musicians and dancers to impresarios. Contemporary writers in the pages of the illustrated press and newspapers documented sonic attachments to a changing visual world establishing an urban soundtrack: the tapping of police batons on the street, the “tiri tiri tam tam” whir of a jazz drummer in a bar, radio broadcasts in public spaces, and the city’s already present multilingual score. Listening for jazz in 1920s Istanbul documents this shifting urban, political, social, and cultural terrain. This paper understands jazz as a product of diaspora and occupation, movement and rescue, recovery and redefinition. It argues that listening for jazz complicates and reconfigures the city’s morphology in the post-Armistice period.