Countering conventional wisdom that finds the source of jazz as a stable arc from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, “How Many Jazzes” is a panel focused on the multiple literary encounters of African American dance music ragged, jazzed, jumped, shouted and stomped between the 1890s and 1950s. This special session treats the literary representations of the dancehall and night club and cabaret in African American literature, roughly from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods through Ann Petry’s Novel The Street. In the process the panel hopes to show the collaborative interrelationship between African American music and writing in the modern era.