[Dixielandjazz] "Jazz" the word.

[Rob McCallum]

Hi all,

The baseball reference is very interesting.  I play in the historic baseball 
program at Greenfield Village/Henry Ford Museum, where there are a number of 
baseball scholars.  I forwarded this bit to them to see if they've ever run 
across references to the word jazz in a baseball context.  When they get 
back to me, I'll pass on what they have to say.

All the best,
Rob McCallum
myspace.com/solarjazz


>From: Steve Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
>To: Rob McCallum <rakmccallum at hotmail.com>
>CC: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
>Subject: [Dixielandjazz] "Jazz" the word.
>Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 09:10:53 -0400
>
>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.
>
>
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