"jazz" in painting, 1915/1916

[George Thompson]

Here we have a positive clue and a dead end.

Albert Gleizes produced a painting in 1915 called "Jazz" and Charles Demuth one called "Negro Jazz Band" in 1916.

To start with the bad news: Demuth was an American painter.  His painting, a watercolor, is reproduced in Charles Demuth, by Barbara Haskell, illustration #19, p. 81.  (New York : Whitney Museum of American Art & H. N. Abrams, 1987)
However, Bruce Kellner, in an email dated Thursday, February 12, 2004, tells me:
"Many of the titles that she [Emily Farnham, Demuth's biographer] does identify, however, are of her own inventions for identification purposes, since Demuth seems not to have titled all of his works himself."
So this is probably not Demuth's title for this painting, but a description concocted in the 1950s, based on its seeming subject matter.

On the other hand, Albert Gleizes, a French Cubist, came to the U. S. for a fairly brief visit in September, 1915.  He was back in Europe by the spring of 1916.  Albert Gleizes: catalogue raisonne (Paris: Fondation Albert Gleizes & Somogy, Editions d'art, c1998) gives 4 paintings in vol. 1, p. 218, 3 of which are dated '15 and one of which is entitled "Jazz 3e et."  One of these paintings clearly shows two blck men playing banjos.

The apparent fact that Gleizes encountered the word "jazz" in NYC in late 1915 or early 1916 and associated it with music played by black musicians does not fit comfortably with what otherwise seems a plausible story, that "jazz" was a west coast word brought to Chicago by a white musician (Bert Kelly); that it was adopted there by one or several other groups comprised of white musicians; that it did not reach NYC until early 1917, when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band came to the city; and that the word and the music did not become a fad until the ODJB made a hit record in the spring of 1917.
It does seem that once the fad hit, every vaudeville musical group that played novelty music started calling itself a "jazz band", and that the response in Chicago to Kelly;s group, and the ODJB, and Tom Brown's band, was pretty enthusiastic, so it may be that the fad started to spread through vaudeville before the ODJB came to NYC and before they recorded their first hit.

GAT

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