"Jazz" in the LATimes, 1912 & 1917

[George Thompson]

To test the LATimes historical database I searched the word "jazz".  The result showed 97 matches from before the end of 1917.  Naturally, most of these are false matches, as suggested by the fact that 14 dated from before the end of 1899; the earliest came from a report of testimony at a murder trial, November 14, 1883.  Since Proquest Historical Newspapers does not highlight the word that is the supposed match, I have checked some but not all of these matches.  I skimmed the murder trial story.  The image seemed perfectly clear, and I did not notice any word I thought might be misread as "jazz".   I do have the following notes of some interest.

The earliest supposed citation from baseball was from October 2, 1911.  The story was a very brief and largely illegible account of a doubleheader.  there was little text -- most of the space was given to the box scores and other data -- and I saw nothing that resembles the word "jazz".
However:
A story from April 2, 1912 was headlined "Ben's Jazz Curve" and began "'I got a new curve this year' softly murmered Henderson yesterday, 'and I am 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."  This paragraph is not very legible, but the reading is correct, and the word in the headline is unmistakable.  The second and last paragraph is even less legible, but the reporter is skeptical, and hopes that "some unintelligent compositor" doesn't set "jag ball" by mistake, because if the ball wobbles, that must be why.

The next supposed match was from a column of real estate ads, May 30, 1915; the next after that from a brief listing of stock prices, semmingly from the stock exchange in Salt Lake City.

The earliest citation with reference to music was the next, an advertisement from February 9, 1917, for a player piano that can be used to play "jazz rags".

Then come a pair of matches from columns of movie reviews by one Grace Kingsley:
"This is the quintessence of Chaplinism, distilled of all the old-line cumbersome jazz, the camera-made comic miracles, the top-heavy action which affects most screen farces."  April 18, 1917.  The movie in question it The Cure, by the way.
"'The Butcher Boy' is pretty much the old jazz stuff as regards action and plot."  April 30, 1917.  This was a Fatty Arbuckle movie.
It seems remarkable that so recently after its introduction to the language, or at least to the language of the west coast, a word that was used to mean "spirit, vigor" was being used to mean the opposite: "banal, cliched, boring", as in hte current expression "and all that jazz".

A note to Barry: a steamship company was offering round-the-world cruises for $617.70.  I'll be buying my tickets as soon as I finalize the deal for a 20 acre farm on the upper east side of Manhattan that I saw advertised in a NYC newspaper from 1807.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.