[Dixielandjazz] Ben's "Jazz Curve" 100 years ago

[Stephen G Barbone]

 From The Boston Globe Newspaper.



One hundred years ago, a hard-throwing but erratic minor league  
pitcher named Ben Henderson was getting ready for his opening day  
start for the Portland Beavers against the Los Angeles Angels.  
Henderson had pitched well for the Beavers the previous year, but he  
began the 1912 season with a well-earned reputation as an unreliable  
drunk.

Henderson gave a Los Angeles Times reporter a preview of what he had  
planned for the game. “I got a new curve this year,” he explained,  
“and I’m goin’ to pitch one or two of them tomorrow. I call it the  
Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with  
it.” The headline for the item, from April 2, 1912, was simply “Ben’s  
Jazz Curve.”

Henderson lost that game, and he was soon out of baseball entirely.  
But we may owe him a debt of gratitude for his wobbly “jazz ball.” In  
a relatively recent surprise for etymologists, the latest historical  
research has located his quote as the first known use of the word  
“jazz”--which in a few short years would bounce from West Coast ball  
fields to the nightclubs of Chicago and beyond. Ultimately, it would  
become the name for a distinctly American music--and a term so  
monumental in its impact that the American Dialect Society in 2000  
named it the Word of the Century.

While the exuberant, syncopated performance style we now recognize as  
jazz was born in New Orleans, the music preceded its memorable name.  
For New Orleans musicians of the time, what they played in their  
collective improvisations was simply a “hot” variety of “ragtime,”  
though that label was growing increasingly outdated.

Meanwhile, out in the Pacific Coast League, Henderson’s “jazz ball”  
turned out to have legs. While the Portland pitcher used “jazz” to  
describe the animated movement on his curveball, it soon caught on  
with other players in the league as another word for “pep” or  
“vigor.” (“Pep” is short for “pepper,” which Henderson told another  
reporter was the secret to his jumpy delivery.)

In the spring of 1913, E.T. “Scoop” Gleeson, a sportswriter for the  
San Francisco Bulletin, reported on a funny new word used by San  
Francisco Seals players at their training camp in the spa town of  
Boyes Springs in Sonoma County, Calif. “Everybody has come back to the  
old town full of the old ‘jazz’ and they promise to knock the fans off  
their feet with their playing,” Gleeson wrote on March 6, 1913. “What  
is the ‘jazz’? Why, it’s a little of that ‘old life,’ the ‘gin-i-ker,’  
the ‘pep,’ otherwise known as the enthusiasalum.”

A month after Gleeson got the “jazz” buzz going, Ernest J. Hopkins, a  
fellow reporter at the Bulletin, devoted a column to the word entitled  
“In Praise of ‘Jazz,’ a Futurist Word Which Has Just Joined the  
Language.” Newspaper writers in the Bay Area and elsewhere quickly  
picked up the new term.

How the word made the leap from baseball to music is still a matter of  
debate. One likely conduit was the orchestra at Boyes Springs brought  
in to entertain the players in 1913, led by the drummer Art Hickman  
and featuring Bert Kelly on banjo. Hickman later recalled that the  
bubbling water of the springs was dubbed “jazz water,” and that the  
word then got transferred to both the lively play on the ball field  
and the spirited music. But Henderson’s “jazz ball” of the previous  
year makes the “jazz water” story a bit of a stretch.

Bert Kelly made his way to Chicago and started his own band in 1914,  
becoming one of the pioneers of the seminal Chicago jazz scene. Both  
black and white, these players mostly came from New Orleans. As Kelly  
later insisted in his unpublished memoir “I Created Jazz,” Bert  
Kelly’s Jazz Band was the first to make use of the word “jazz” (also  
variously spelled “jass,” “jas,” or “jaz”). But there’s no hard  
evidence of the term’s application to music until a July 11, 1915  
Chicago Tribune article portraying a local club where “jazz blues”  
could be enjoyed. In early 1916, New Orleans transplants started up  
“jass bands” that brought the “Dixieland” sound to Chicago, and over  
the course of that year the jazz bug began spreading to other cities  
as well.

After jazz music became a nationwide craze in 1917, with the Original  
Dixieland Jazz Band and other recording groups capitalizing on the  
trendy new term, everyone wanted to know where “jazz” came from. An  
advertisement for New Victor Records on March 7 of that year seemed to  
support Bert Kelly’s claim: “Some say the Jass band originated in  
Chicago. Chicago says it came from San Francisco.” Despite that hint,  
the Boyes Springs connection remained buried until the San Franciscan  
etymologist Peter Tamony dug up Gleeson’s old clippings in 1939.

Tamony’s legacy has been carried on by latter-day word hunters who use  
digitized newspaper databases to search for evidence. George Thompson,  
a librarian at New York University, was the first to spot the “Ben’s  
Jazz Curve” article when the Los Angeles Times archive went online in  
2003.

“Jazz” still holds many mysteries, and we may never know its original  
roots with certainty. Ephemeral traces like announcements of early  
jazz bands performing around Chicago’s South Side have, by and large,  
been lost to history. But a century after Henderson let loose his  
“jazz ball,” researchers are finally getting a handle on this  
energetic little word.