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The paradox of jazz music lies entirely in the complex relationship between the claim for real musical presence and the claim for a musical otherness by means of records, whatever their form. To begin with, the presuppositions that make jazz an improvised and locally produced music are analyzed. In the second part, we try to show how jazz is the matrix of a functionally ambivalent relationship to listening in contemporary societies. In the third part we develop the theme of the “real presence” of jazz. In jazz defined as a social world, the record has been a very important fetish, not as an imperfect substitute for live music, but as an autonomous universe. The former founded and guaranteed the latter in the long term. Thus the ambivalence of jazz ends up inscribed in the very definition of such an undecided object.