[Dixielandjazz] Explaining "Jazz" and "Jass"

[Steve Barbone]

EDWIN COLTRIN (ye olde mnouldy fygge) <boreda at sbcglobal.net> wrote (polite
snip)

> Do we explain to the audience that "Jazz Me Blues or Jazzin Babies, etc  is
> really "JASS"  and they can draw their own conclusions.

Do we ever!!! Of course my audiences are mostly young and part of our
"connecting" is to point out via humor that; the band (average age 72);
their parents; and their grandparents were no different from them as far as
double entendre songs go. And not too different as far as life styles went.

Jazz in the 1920s was viewed by many the same way Rap is viewed by many
today. Degenerate music. Same stuff, different day. Who were the customers?
The gangsters, and those who drank bootleg booze and cavorted as libertines.

E.G., I tell the audience, Blues My Naughty Sweetie is a typical song about
"blue people". Why were some people blue? Because they had a social disease
and in those days the cure for that involved arsenic (or some other medicine
that turned you a slightly bluish color) Hence the title. Sometimes I even
have to explain social disease but that's fun too.

You can be sure that we explain "Jazz Me Blues" in the context of what it
really meant. No different from what "Rock & Roll" means. (ask a 1960s
hippie) You can also be sure that we tell this wonderful young audience
about Louis Armstrong's roving eye, the hookers and whore houses of old New
Orleans, reefers, drugs, and all sorts of interesting facets about the raw
stuff of life that went into this music.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg as far as how sex and jazz come
together. (pun intended :-) VBG)

I figure that to attract the kids, I might as well talk about the reasons
that attracted me to jazz when I was a kid. Hip musicians, sex, booze, mob
joint jazz nightclubs (or stories about them) and the clarinet player (e.g.
Artie Shaw) gets the girls. I certainly did not go to 52nd Street and the
Village just to hear artsy music as a teenager. Nor do I play artsy music,
neither then nor now. (When I was 16, I met Omer Simeon. That was a year
before I knew who Jelly Roll Morton and the Red Hot Peppers were.)

Cheers,
Steve Barbone