In 1969 the late saxophonist Albert Ayler recorded “Masonic Inborn”, a long and intense improvisation on the bagpipe. As far as we know, this piece is the only one in the history of jazz that clearly mentions the masonic tradition. This rarity should not hide the fact that the masonic occurrence is a fascinating but unknown subject of jazz history. Many pre-war jazzmen actively belonged to the Black American masonry—called Prince Hall Masonry—but without displaying it in their artistic works. After WWII, masonry is neglected by musicians in favor of other movements considered more politically active. Paradoxically, the use of masonic symbols—just like Egyptian, Afrocentric, Eastern, and countercultural mythologies— appears more openly on album covers, posters and leaflets. While studying such personalities as Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, Cab Calloway, Ayler, but also Martin Delany, Lewis Hayden, Prince Hall, this article will analyze how African-American initiation societies—including freemasonry—carried the gestation of a primordial Afrocentric symbolism. A vital, constitutive but disregarded fact of The Black Atlantic, this symbolism first appeared, by an unusual externalizing phenomenon, on American musical stages, before becoming the intellectual and political paradigm we know today.