Sometimes we win one

[George Thompson]

The world may be deaf to the true story of "The Windy City" and results on "The Big Apple" are at best mixed, but the correct origin of "jazz" seems to have gotten around.

The opening pages of The Cambridge companion to Jazz, 2002, edited by Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, has a paragraph on p. 2 beginning "According to several researchers, the earliest appearance of the word jazz in written form was probably in San Francisco newspapers."  The source cited is Lewis Porter, Jazz: A Century of Change, 1997.  The fact that the story has been noticed and assimilated by jazz historians means that Gerry Cohen doesn't get credit for finding it, but still. . . .

GAT

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