[Dixielandjazz] "Jazz" the word.

[Steve Barbone]

Jazz? Perhaps the baseball analogy is merely the first one "written down"?
Like the copyright on Tiger Rag? Not the real origination of the word/tune?
The answer quoted below seems to cover more of the bases. :-) VBG

SPOURCE: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-jaz1.htm

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

[Q] From Brett Culton: ³Could you please tell me the origin of the word
jazz?²

[A] It¹s a deceptively simple question. A mish-mash of colliding egos,
conflicting claims and confused memories has led researchers down many false
trails while searching for the origins of this American art form, not least
where its name came from.

To pluck some examples from the many in the books: people have pointed to
Jasper, the name of a dancing slave on a plantation near New Orleans in
about 1825 whose nickname was Jazz; to a Mississippi drummer named Chas
Washington in the late nineteenth century or to Chas, the nickname of
Charles Alexander (of Alexander¹s Ragtime Band) about 1910; to a Chicago
musician named Jasbo Brown; to a band conductor in New Orleans about 1904
called Mr Razz; to the French chassé, a gliding dancing step that had
already been turned into the archetypically American verb sashay as long ago
as the 1830s; to the French jaser, useless talk for the pleasure of hearing
one¹s own voice; or the Arabic jazib, one who allures.

The intimate association of jazz with American black culture has led others
to look for an origin in African languages, such as the Mandingo jasi,
become unlike oneself, Tshiluba jaja, cause to dance, or Temne yas, be
extremely lively or energetic.

One early jazz player, Garvin Bushell, was sure it had a fragrant origin. In
his 1988 book Jazz From the Beginning, he remembers his early days in music,
around 1916: ³The perfume industry was very big in New Orleans in those
days, since the French had brought it over with them. They used jasmine ‹
oil of jasmine ‹ in all different odors to pep it up. It gave more force to
the scent. So they would say, Œlet¹s jass it up a bit,¹ when something was a
little dead.² John Philip Sousa suggested in the 1920s that jazz slid into
our vocabulary by way of the vaudeville stage, in which all the acts would
come back on to the stage at the end of a performance to give a rousing,
boisterous finale called a jazzbo, a type of low physical comedy. (This one
looks plausible; however, jazzbo isn¹t recorded before 1917 and might be
from jazz plus bo, an abbreviation of boy.)

If you weren¹t confused before, I suspect you are now. There are more folk
etymologies around this word than almost any other, many of them vehemently
held in defiance of the evidence.

What we do know, as the result of research by Gerald Cohen, is that the word
suddenly starts to appear in the San Francisco Bulletin in March 1913 in a
series of articles about baseball by E T ³Scoop² Gleeson (it¹s recently been
found that an isolated example appeared about a year earlier in the Los
Angeles Times, but this is also in a baseball context). Early examples had
nothing to do with music but referred to an intangible quality possessed by
baseball players, what another writer in the newspaper, Ernest Hopkins,
described in April that year as ³life, vigor, energy, effervescence of
spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility, ebulliency, courage, happiness
‹ oh, what¹s the use? ‹ JAZZ. Nothing else can express it².

Gleeson later said that he had got it from another newsman, Spike Slattery,
while they were at the training camp of the local baseball team, the San
Francisco Seals. Slattery said he had heard it in a crap game. Art Hickman,
an unemployed local musician, was at the camp to make contacts among the
newsmen but took on the job of organising evening entertainments. Among
these was a ragtime band he created from other out-of-work musicians,
including a couple of banjo players. It was this band that developed a new
sound that started to be described in the training camp as jazz. This name
went with Hickman to engagements in San Francisco and later to New York,
though his type of syncopated rag, later to be called sweet jazz, turned out
to be a dead end musically.

By the following year, it seems that the word had spread to Chicago, most
probably through the efforts of another bandleader, Bert Kelly. In 1916 it
appeared there in a different spelling in the name of the New Orleans Jass
Band. Despite this band¹s name, the word wasn¹t known in New Orleans until
1917, as early jazz musicians attested. It is said to have arrived through
the medium of a letter from Freddie Keppard in Chicago to the cornet player
Joe Oliver. Oliver showed the letter to his protégé Louis Armstrong and the
name soon became applied to the New Orleans style that became dominant and
which was later called hot jazz to distinguish it from the Art Hickman sort.

The big question remains: where did those San Francisco crapshooters of 1913
get their word from? This is the point where we step off the path and run
the risk of disappearing into an etymological quicksand. Scoop Gleason said
that when they rolled the dice players would call out ³Come on, the old
jazz². It looks as though they were using the word as an incantation, a call
to Lady Luck to smile on them.

It¹s commonly said that the word had strong sexual associations, being a low
slang term among blacks for copulation. This may be so, though it¹s odd that
the worldly-wise journalists on the San Francisco Bulletin didn¹t realise it
at the time. If they had, they would surely have stopped using it, at least
in their newspaper columns. The first direct sexual associations date only
from 1918, at a point by which the word¹s musical sense had become firmly
established. We have no knowledge of the racial background of those crap
shooters in San Francisco, so there¹s even doubt whether the word has any
associations with black English at all.

The most plausible sexual origin is in the word jism, also known as jasm.
This has a long history in American English, being known in print from 1842
and probably a lot earlier still in the spoken language. It could have the
same sense of spirit, energy or strength later associated with jazz, but the
primary idea seems to have been semen or sperm, a meaning jism still has,
one that has obvious associations with vitality and virility. It may be
relevant that one of the earlier examples, in the Daily Californian in
February 1916, writes the word as jaz-m.

It doesn¹t seem too implausible to suggest that jasm lost its final letter,
turned into jass and then into jazz. It¹s likely that Gleeson and his fellow
newspapermen didn¹t connect their new word jazz with jism, not knowing about
the intermediate steps.

Of course, that just takes the whole matter back another step in this
never-ending dance of word history. The English Dialect Dictionary records
the eighteenth-century form chissom, to bud, sprout or germinate, which
looks possible. Others have pointed to an origin, via black slaves, from
words like Ki-Kongo dinza, the life force, or from other African languages.
So at least some of those folk etymologies may be nearer the truth than one
might have thought.