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The Cambridge Companion to Jazz

Edited by Mervyn Cooke, David Horn

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521663205

Online ISBN: 9781139002233

Hardback ISBN: 9780521663205

Paperback ISBN: 9780521663885

Chapter

The word jazz pp. 1-6

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521663205.002

Cambridge University Press

 The word jazz
krin gabbard

Jazz is a construct. Nothing can be called jazz simply because of its nature.
Musical genres such as the military march, opera and reggae are relatively
homogeneous and easy to identify. By contrast, the term jazz is routinely
applied to musics that have as little in common as an improvisation
by Marilyn Crispell and a 1923 recording by King Oliver and his Creole
Jazz Band. Developed well outside the more carefully regulated institutions
of American culture, early jazz, proto-jazz or Ur-jazz was performed by
people from an extremely wide variety of backgrounds. Many styles of play-
ing were mixed together and others were split off and acquired different
names. If today we call something jazz, it has much more to do with the
utterances of critics, journalists, record companies and club owners than
with the music itself.
Those who have been most devoted to defining the music and to dis-
criminating between true jazz and false jazz often rely upon tautologies and
ad hominem arguments. The esteemed poet and jazz writer Philip Larkin,
for example, once wrote:

I like jazz to be jazz. A. E. Housman said he could recognize poetry

because it made his throat tighten and his eyes water: I can recognize jazz
because it makes me tap my foot, grunt affirmative exhortations, or even
get up and caper around the room. If it doesnt do this, then however
musically interesting or spiritually adventurous or racially praiseworthy it
is, it isnt jazz. If thats being a purist, then Im a purist. [Larkin 1985, 175]

One could argue that Larkins definition of jazz works only for him. A
more suspicious observer might add that he is driven by unarticulated
or unconscious agenda that have more to do with ideology and attitudes
about race than with music. Indeed, as a jazz writers manifesto recedes in
time, the non-musical agenda behind it become increasingly evident. To
speak generously, we can credit certain writers with discovering and publi-
cising what is most vital in certain musical cultures. Speaking critically, we
might accuse writers of colonising the music to fit their own prejudices and
obsessions.
If critics and other jazz writers have been primarily responsible for cre-
ating and sustaining notions about jazz, the musicians themselves have often
[1] refused to state their own positions on what the music may or may not be.

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2 Krin Gabbard

Although there have always been highly articulate artists playing the music,
not all have been interested in a conversation that creates borders around
what they play. At their most whimsical or polemical, musicians have relished
the opportunity to mystify rather than clarify. Louis Armstrongs legend-
ary reply to the request that he define jazz If youve got to ask, youll
never know is perhaps the best-known statement by a musician who pre-
ferred not to be pigeon-holed. Part of the stance of the hipster jazz artist
has almost always been to signify on dominant discourses rather than to
contribute to them.
The reluctance among some musicians to establish the boundaries of
what is and is not jazz has not stopped writers from decrying a musician
for selling out, bleaching the music, betraying a legacy, abandoning the
audience or playing anti-jazz. Nevertheless, those who would protect the
term are on a slippery slope, to say the least. The word has always carried a
great many meanings, many of them outside music. Even as a term limited
to a type of music, it has gone through radical changes in meaning. And
many who have been granted pride of place among jazz artists have tried to
disassociate themselves from the term.

According to several researchers, the earliest appearance of the word jazz

in written form was probably in San Francisco newspapers. In 1913, Ernest
J. Hopkins offered this definition: something like life, vigor, energy, effer-
vescence of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility, ebulliency, courage,
happiness oh, whats the use? JAZZ. When the word began showing
up on the sports pages of the San Francisco Bulletin, also in 1913, the term
regularly appeared in the column by Scoop Gleeson. For example, Gleeson
wrote, Everybody has come back full of the old jazz. What is the jazz?
Why, its a little of the old life, the gin-i-ker, the pep, otherwise known
as the enthusiasalum (quoted in Porter 1997, 5). Needless to say, neither
Hopkins nor Gleeson linked the term to music. It is not surprising, however,
that a sportswriter, who is especially likely to bring terms from slang and
oral culture into his published writings, would be one of the first to put a
word such as jazz into a newspaper.
By the 1920s, the term was appearing in literary works as a synonym
for sexual intercourse. It had almost certainly carried this meaning in oral
culture at least since the turn of the century. In the 1970s Dick Holbrook
sought early appearances of the word by making inquiries among older
graduates of his college who lived in the western United States. One replied
that he had heard jazz used as slang for sexual intercourse in California,
New Mexico, Arizona and even New Hampshire as early as 1904. Another
wrote, Yes. Circa 1910 in Chicago. When you went out for a little Jazz, you
just werent singing Dixie (quoted in Porter 1997, 4). This kind of evidence

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3 The word jazz

has led many to believe that the word originally had a sexual reference, per-
haps related to the word jism, slang for semen. As is often the case with vern-
acular terms, jazz lost its obscene connotations as it made its way into more
polite discourse in the second decade of the twentieth century. Much the
same can be said for the original, sexual meaning of the phrase rock-and-
roll and its widely accepted subsequent meaning as a kind of music.
The word jazz almost surely began in African-American slang, but many
counter-theories on the terms origins have been advanced. Clarence Major
has found an African word from a Bantu dialect, jaja, to dance or play music.
Because of the French presence in New Orleans during the early years of
the musics development, some have suggested that the word comes from
the French jaser, meaning to banter or chat. The French term chasse beau
may have been the inspiration for the American term Jasbo, and thus for
jazz. There was even a bandleader named Jasbo Brown, whose name has
been brought forth as a source (Porter 1997, 1). Then there was the dancing
slave named Jasper who may have inspired people to shout Jas, Jas as he
performed. One of the entries in Bill Crows Jazz Anecdotes cites the use of
jasmine oil in perfumes popular in New Orleans: To add it to perfume was
called jazzing it up. The strong scent was popular in the red-light district,
where a working girl might approach a prospective customer and say, Is
jass on your mind tonight, young fellow? (1990, 19).
All of these explanations for the terms genesis are conjectural and cannot
be proven. We also do not know when the term jazz became more firmly
attached to music, although newspaper articles were making the connection
as early as 1915 (Porter 1997, 10). But if the term did originate as sexual slang,
then it follows that its more polite association with energy and enthusiasm
could have had a middle passage as reference to a scandalous and/or energetic
form of dance music. Thus the arguments for how a sexual term associated
with jasmine oil came to mean popular music in New Orleans can also be
marshalled to explain the trajectory of a slang word for semen.
The shift from jass to jazz is also impossible to explain with certainty,
but an enchanting theory involves posters for the Original Dixieland Jass
Band, a group that made what are widely considered to be the first jazz
recordings in 1917. When people committed mischief on their posters by
obliterating the J, the bands leader, Nick LaRocca, decided to change the
name to the Original Dixieland JAZZ Band (Crow 1990, 20).
LaRocca was not, however, successful in making the word jazz stick to
his or anyone elses music. We now regularly use the term Jazz Age to refer
to fast living and night life in the United States in the 1920s; Henri Matisse
used the word to characterise a series of paper cut-outs of circus subjects he
constructed in the 1930s; and, in one form or another, the word has been
used more recently as the brand name for a cologne, a single-use digital

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4 Krin Gabbard

camera, a computer software program, and an American basketball team

called the Utah Jazz that was founded in New Orleans but subsequently
(and oxymoronically) moved to a state known for its religious and political
conservatism.
Keep in mind also that in the 1920s Louis Armstrong and a great many
other African-American artists who played what we now call jazz would have
told you that they were playing blues or ragtime (Peretti 1992, 42). Mean-
while, for most white Americans in the 1920s, Paul Whiteman was The King
of Jazz, Al Jolson was The Jazz Singer, Irving Berlin was Mr Jazz Himself ,
and Sophie Tucker was The Queen of Jazz. The fact that most jazz writers
today look past these white entertainers and apply the term to their African-
American and Creole contemporaries has resulted in the striking statement
by Michael Rogin that the 1927 film that starred Al Jolson as a blackface
entertainer, The Jazz Singer, contains no jazz (Rogin 1996, 112). While
most white Americans in the 1920s thought of jazz as the music of White-
man, Jolson and George Gershwin, critics today have read more modern
forms of music back into the 1920s in order to designate Armstrong, Oliver,
Morton, Bechet, Henderson and Ellington as the real jazz artists. Paraphras-
ing Thomas Kuhn, Scott DeVeaux has pointed out that jazz history, like all
history, is usually written backwards (1997, 443; see Kuhn 1970, 138).
Although a few jazz purists were already beginning to stake their claim
on the term in the 1920s, not all of what they wrote is consistent with more
contemporary meanings of the music. A revealing example can be found
in the articles that Roger Pryor Dodge wrote in the 1920s for the English
review, The Dancing Times (see Dodge 1995). Although Dodge claimed that
Whiteman, Gershwin and Berlin did not play jazz, and although he insisted
that artists such as Ellington, Henderson and Armstrong did, he included
Ted Lewis and the Mound City Blue Blowers in the list of artists who played
the real thing. In fact, he listed Lewis first in his list of true jazz artists. The
parity of Ted Lewis and Duke Ellington that Dodge sincerely posited in the
1920s is unthinkable at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Disagreements about who did and did not play the real thing became
most intense in the 1940s when the battle between the ancients and the
moderns was fought on several fronts. As Bernard Gendron has written,
the defenders of the contrapuntal music from old New Orleans traded in-
sults with champions of the more sophisticated dance music from the 1930s
and 1940s. Writing in journals such The Record Changer and H.R.S. Rag,
proponents of early jazz claimed that it was authentic, emotionally power-
ful and the music of the folk. In Down Beat and Metronome, swing was
praised for being complex, progressive and technically demanding. A few
years later, the same arguments that had been advanced for swing were
appropriated to defend the emerging new music, bebop. As Gendron points

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5 The word jazz

out (1995, 32), these arguments formed the basis for subsequent assertions
that jazz was a legitimate art form. Although they violently disagreed on
the definition of jazz, critics in the 1940s tacitly agreed to fight their battles
around a set of dualisms black versus white, art versus commerce, nature
versus culture, technique versus affect, European versus native on which
claims about jazz as art have been built ever since.
By the late 1940s, after the bebop revolution had alienated most of the
listeners who had followed the big bands, Down Beat launched a contest to
find a new name for a music that did not include bebop but that might win
back readers who had abandoned the magazine and the music to which it was
devoted. Terms such as ragtonia, syncopep, crewcut music, Amerimusic
and Jarb all failed to replace the word jazz (Crow 1990, 21). Although
writers had already been struggling over the term for several decades, it was
exhibiting surprising durability.
By the 1950s, jazz had become an elite music policed by devoted groups
of fans and critics. As the music continued to evolve, still more terms were
introduced to account for the fact that jazz musicians were no longer playing
what everyone used to call jazz. A phrase which had brief but considerable
success was third stream, a term to describe music that was carefully com-
posed and inflected with tonalities and concepts drawn from European
classical music. Jazz was becoming even more of an art music for the elite,
and once again the critics felt the need for a better word. Critics were also
likely to coin terms like anti-jazz and non-jazz to describe the sounds of
Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, even if these avant-garde
musicians would later be deified as the great priests of jazz when rock in-
fluences entered into the music. For most purists, fusion became the new
anti-jazz in the 1970s. In the 1980s, music that mixed jazz improvisation
with New Age elements was attacked as the latest force that was destroying
jazz. In 1997 Eric Nisenson published Blue: The Murder of Jazz, in which
he argued that Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch and the
staff of Jazz at Lincoln Center were killing the music by enforcing a canon
of older musicians and established styles. For Nisenson, jazz would seem to
be defined not as recognisable stylistic conventions but as constant experi-
mentation and forward movement.
In spite of continuing and often bellicose attempts throughout most of
the twentieth century to attach the term to specific kinds of music, critics
had lost control of the word almost entirely by the 1970s when departments
of dance and physical education in colleges and universities began to offer
courses in jazz dance. Students heard music that was more likely to be rock
or pop while mimicking moves that recalled musicals choreographed by
Bob Fosse. At the end of the twentieth century, when a student said that
she was studying jazz, it usually meant a course in modern dance. In health

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6 Krin Gabbard

clubs and in private homes with a videocassette recorder, people could even
indulge in something called jazzercise.
The musicians themselves, however, did not always feel vindicated when
critics determined them worthy of the honorific term. Just as Louis
Armstrong and/or Fats Waller allegedly finessed the opportunity to de-
fine jazz, other musicians bristled at the idea that they should be confined
by a single word. Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton have both objected to a
term they found to be inadequate as their musics developed beyond familiar
paradigms. Davis explicitly associated the word jazz with slavery (Davis and
Troupe 1989, 325). Quoted in 1944, Duke Ellington expressed a preference
for the term Negro folk music (Tucker 1993, 218). Much later, writing in
his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress (1973), Ellington wrote, Jazz is
only a word and really has no meaning. We stopped using it in 1943 (452).
Beginning in the 1960s, some of the more militant African-American artists
insisted that they were playing black music. In 1970 Max Roach ruefully
observed that Dont give me all that jazz is synonymous with Dont give
me all that shit. He continued, Personally I resent the word unequivocally
because of our spirituals and our heritage; the work and sweat that went
into our music is above shit. I dont know whether anybody else realizes
what this means, but I really do, and I am vehement about it. The proper
name for it, if you want to speak about it historically, is music that has been
created and developed by musicians of African descent who are in America
(A. Taylor 1983, 110).
Nevertheless, the word jazz has proved remarkably durable in designating
a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a
coherent tradition. Discussions of the music including this one would
be much less effective without the word. As John Szwed has pointed out,
the word jazz now has more meaning outside the music and has a special
appeal to a greater audience beyond the circle of devotees and connoisseurs:
Jazz (as we might now call this larger area of discussion) has outgrown its
original means, moving beyond the music to become what some would call a
discourse, a system of influences, a point at which a number of texts converge
and where a number of symbolic codes are created (Szwed 2000, 7). As
jazz moved into the twenty-first century, those codes had more to do with
urbanity, artistic discipline and romance than with dissipation and drug
abuse. Even as late as the 1980s, few would have predicted this shift. Those
who care about the music will surely be just as surprised by what the word
will come to mean if it survives for a second century.

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