1912 "jazz"--If not isolated, where is the evidence?

[Baker, John]

        Gerald, where are you going with this?  If your point is that Henderson did not popularize "jazz," you've got a solid case.  But you seem to be going further and arguing that Henderson independently originated "jazz" in a nonce-use, and there I think you're on shaky ground.  It just doesn't seem likely that such a distinctive and unusual term would have come up twice in the Pacific Coast League in a 12-month period, without there being some connection.

        Instead, it seems far more likely that both Gleeson and Henderson were using a term that had some pre-existing, though limited, currency.  As Dave Wilton points out, this need not be taken as undercutting Scoop Gleeson's account of how he first heard the word.

        The argument from the absence of evidence, on which you seem in part to be relying, goes only so far.  We all know that an obscure term can bounce around without being recorded for years or even decades, before suddenly achieving prominence.

John Baker