[Dixielandjazz] Etymology of Jazz

Mon Jun 8 17:16:34 PDT 2009

Clever indeed! We need all of you! Keep the music alive!

Scott Anthony

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "G. William Oakley" <gwilliamoakley at wispertel.net>
To: "Scott Anthony" <santh at comcast.net>; "DJML" 
<dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Monday, June 08, 2009 11:43 AM
Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] Etymology of Jazz

>A veeeeeerrrryyy clever ploy, Scott. It was a terrific article and you
> hooked me into becoming a member.
>
> Isn't it amazing how dry and mundane reportage has become. Can you
> imagine a contemporary sports reporter using the kind of language
> Gleeson employs. I wonder why he didn't pick up on the Hickman
> connection and tie the word into the music.
>
> Thanks for turning me onto the article.
>
> Best
> Bill
>
> Scott Anthony wrote:
>> There is an article by etymologist Dan Cassidy that we published in
>> "The San Francisco Cricket" the quarterly publication of the San
>> Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation of which I am the editor. I
>> would put the link to it here, but I'd rather have you go to the
>> website and get it directly - maybe catch some new members!
>>
>> At any rate, go to www.sftradjazz.org , click on the "Articles" button
>> in the top row. This will take you to a handy table of the available
>> free back issues of the Cricket. The Dan Cassidy Jazz article is #31
>> Spring 2006.
>>
>> Scott Anthony
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "G. William Oakley"
>> <gwilliamoakley at wispertel.net>
>> To: <santh at comcast.net>
>> Cc: "Dixieland Jazz Mailing List" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
>> Sent: Monday, June 08, 2009 8:56 AM
>> Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Etymology of Jazz
>>
>>
>> G. William Oakley writes...
>>
>>> A recent thread on DJML discussed the origins of the word Jazz. I have
>>> just finished reading /Word Myths, Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends
>>> /by David Wilton. In the book Wilton devotes a section to the
>>> etymology of the word jazz.
>>>
>>
>>> He discusses many of the popular misconceptions of the word which I
>>> won’t go into here but gets to the point as follows:
>>>
>>> With all of these incorrect hypotheses, folkloric tales and errors can
>>> we even know the true origin of /jazz/? The answer is yes. The true
>>> origin of the word was first put forward by San Francisco etymologist
>>> Peter Tamony in 1938. It has been discussed in several major reference
>>> works, including H.L. Mencken’s /The American Language. /And recent
>>> research by etymologists Gerald Cohen, Barry Popik, and David Shulman
>>> have conclusively demonstrated Tamony’s original hypothesis to be
>>> correct.
>>>
>>> Mencken succinctly summarizes Tamony’s hypothesis in his 1948
>>> Supplement 2 to /The American Language./
>>>
>>> Tamony says that jazz was introduced to San Francisco in 1913 by
>>> William (Spike) Slattery, sports editor of the Call, and
>>> propagated by a band leader named Art Hickman. It reached Chicago
>>> by 1915 but was not heard of in New York until a year later….[In a
>>> note:] Slattery, according to Tamony borrowed it from the
>>> vocabulary of crap-shooters and used it “as a synonym for ginger
>>> and pep,” but it was soon used to designate Hickman’s music, much
>>> to Hickman’s disgust.”
>>>
>>> Backing up Tamony’s hypothesis, one of the first known uses of the
>>> word /jazz/ appears in a march 3, 1913, baseball article in The San
>>> Francisco Call Bulletin by E. T. ‘Scoop’ Gleeson:
>>>
>>> McCarl has been heralded all along the line as a “busher,” but now
>>> it develops that this dope is very much to the ”jazz.”
>>>
>>> Three days later, Gleeson writes:
>>>
>>> Everybody has come back to the old town full of the old “jazz” and
>>> [the San Francisco Seals] promise to knock the fans off their feet
>>> with their playing. What is the “jazz”? Why, it’s a little of that
>>> “old life,” the “old gin-i-ker,” the “pep,” otherwise known as the
>>> enthusiasalum [sic]. A grain of “jazz” and you feel like going out
>>> and eating your way through Twin Peaks. The team which speeded
>>> into town this morning comes pretty close to representing the pick
>>> of the army. Its members have trained on ragtime and “jazz” and
>>> manager Dell Howard says there is no stopping them.
>>>
>>> Gleeson used /jazz/ in his baseball articles throughout the month of
>>> March 1913. Decades later, in 1938, Gleeson recalls the origin of
>>> /jazz/:
>>>
>>> Similarly the very word “jazz” itself came into general usage at
>>> the same time. We were all seated around the dinner table at Boyes
>>> Springs, Sonoma County, the Seals spring training site, and
>>> William (Spike) Slattery, then sports editor of The Call, spoke
>>> about something being the “jazz,” or the old “gin-iker fizz.”
>>> Spike had picked up the expression in a crap game. Whenever one of
>>> the players rolled the dice he would shout, “come on, the old
>>> jazz.” For the next week we gave “jazz” a great play in all our
>>> stories. And when Hickman’s orchestra swung into action for the
>>> evening’s dances, it was natural to find it included as “the
>>> jazziest tune tooters in all of the Valley of the Moon.”
>>>
>>> Gleeson’s use…of jazziest to describe Hickman’s music is apparently in
>>> the sense of peppiest, and does not denote the style of music – that
>>> would come later.
>>>
>>> Art Hickman is the key figure in developing the musical sense of jazz
>>> from the pep, vigor sense. In 1913 he was hired to put together a band
>>> for the Seal’s entertainment during spring training. Another
>>> frequenter of the Seal’s training camp was James Woods, manager of the
>>> St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. After seeing Hickman at Boyes
>>> Springs, Woods gave him a regular job at the St. Francis, a gig that
>>> made Hickman one of the top orchestra leaders in the country. The
>>> word, popular among the Seals and their cadre of accompanying
>>> sportswriters, became associated with Hickman’s ragtime music,
>>> evidently to Hickman’s dismay.
>>>
>>> In 1914, Bert Kelly, a musician in Hickman’s orchestra, moved east and
>>> started his own dance band in Chicago. In a 1957 letter to Variety,
>>> Kelly claims to be the first to use /jazz /to denote a style of music.
>>> While this claim cannot be verified, it seems likely. The first use of
>>> the term in print to mean the style of music is from 1916.
>>>
>>> So jazz began life as a San Francisco sportswriter’s term…, [then] was
>>> applied to the ragtime music of Art Hickman…, traveled east with
>>> musicians until it eventually became associated with the new style of
>>> music coming out of New Orleans.
>>>
>>
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