Bert Kelly's I Invented Jazz

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Thu Sep 1 02:48:35 UTC 2005


On 8/31/05, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      Bert Kelly's I Invented Jazz
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Bert Kelly was a San Francisco musician associated with Art Hickman.
> It seems that Hickman was the first to apply the word Jazz to music,
> and that Kelly brought the word to Chicago in 1915 or so, where it was
> taken up by the Original Dixieland Jazz Bnad, which made the first
> recordings of a jazz band.

What was the original name of the band? The Original Dixieland Band?
What motivated the addition of "jazz" to the name?

-Willson Gray

>
> It was reported in 1960 that Kelly had written an autobiography called
> I Invented Jazz, which was to be published by Vantage Press, a vanity
> publishing company.  You folks will recall a posting or several
> postings -- you all do remember every posting made here, don't you? --
> regarding this book; they came to the conclusion that it must never
> have been published.
>
> It seems that the manuscript of the book was at least recently still in
> the hands of Kelly's son, Albert R. Kelly Jr.  It is cited in Lawrence
> Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band, N. Y., &c:
> Oxford U. Pr., 2005, p. 333, fn. 21.  I have what I hope is a current
> email address of Prof. Gushee and will try to contact the son.
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>


--
-Wilson Gray



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