Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb

Sun Sep 28 16:57:37 UTC 2008

A few years ago, Oxford UPr published Kansas City jazz : from ragtime to bebop-- a history.  This made use of a number of interviews with KC musicians, mostly or all black, and many of the interviews had been done decades before the book was published, so that a number were with men who were musicians in the 1910s.  they generally agreed that they did not call the music that they were playing at that time "jazz".
There was also a quite successful vaudeville act during most of the 1910s called the Creole Band, made up of black musicians from New Orleans (including Freddie Keppard), though they met and formed their band in California.  There's been a book on them recently, by Lawrence Gushee.  They also didn't call their music "jazz".

The Boies Spring to Hickman to Kelly connection makes sense.
Hickman had been director of entertainment at boies Spring; his band played a lively, peppy dance music, and "jazz", meaning energy, vigor would make a good trademark; Kelly was a sideman to Hickman who went off on his own, leading a small group and taking the word with him.
Unfortunately, none of this is very well documented from sources of the 1910s, except for Hickman's presence at Boies Spring in 1913.  We know about it from interviews with Kelly, long after the fact.  He wrote a book which was supposed to be published by a vanity press in the 1960s, but somehow it never appeared.  If I recall, it would have been called "How I Invented Jazz".  The manuscript was in the hands of his son, a few years ago.  I don't think anyone has turned up an ad or article saying "Art Hickman and his Jazz Band are now playing for dancing. . . ."  Bert Kelly was said to have caused a sensation when he reached Chicago, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were also supposed to have been a sensation when they formed in chicago and borrowed the word Jazz from Kelly's group, and the ODJB was supposed also to have torn up NYC when they opened there, but it seems that these occasions were famous retroactively.
I made some attempt to look through daily newspapers from Frisco and  chicago for news stories or ads, but since I don't live in either town, that's a pain in the ass to do, involving interlibrary loan of microfilms.  Plus, I don't give a damn about anything else that may have happened in those towns.  But to the extent that I did read these papers, I found nothing useful.  I looked through a number of NYC papers, which of course were easily to hand, and since I ahve a general interest in NYC, I was rewarded by occasional tidbits that had nothing to do with what I was after.  (this is the performing seal approach to research: I don't mind spending an afternoon reading a century-old newspaper, but I require being tossed a herring every so often.  The Frisco and Chicago papers didn't have any herrings for me.)
Teh NYTimes and The Evening Sun seemed to have had the best coverage of NYC nightlife, ca. 1916-1917.

Speaking of Frisco, there was a vaudeville dancer during the 1910s named Joe Frisco, whose specialty was a "jazz dance".  He's spoken of unkindly in the history of jazz dance because his act had nothing to do with jazz music nor with what later was thought of as jazz dance.  He was what was otherwise called an eccentric dancer, and evidently he took the name "jazz dance" from the word's other original meaning: nonsense, foolishness, &c.  I looked for references to him, also, trying to find when he started to used the "jazz dance" billing.

Getting back to Hickman: he made three major mistakes in his career: he stayed in San Francisco, except for one summer in NYC; he played tightly arranged "sweet" music, not improvisational hot music -- one of his arrangers was Ferdy Grofe, who later was with Paul Whiteman; and he died young.  But lately he's gotten some attention in Allyn Shipton's history of jazz and there are 2 CDs of his recordings.  Perhaps some musicologist will work on him and help us out.

Kelly was a banjoist who left performing by the end of the 1910s or so; at first, he became a booker for jazz groups, then opened jazz clubs, and finally ran the hat check concessions at several nightclubs.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Baker, John" <JMB at STRADLEY.COM>
Date: Saturday, September 27, 2008 6:25 pm
Subject: Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

>         The most plausible account is that "jazz" was first applied to
> music by Bert Kelly, who was a banjoist with Art Hickman's band at Boies
> Spring.  Kelly formed Bert Kelly's Jazz Band in Chicago in 1914 or 1915,
> and by mid-1915 "jazz" was being used interchangeably with "blues" for
> a
> style of music.  Many of the Chicago musicians, and the style of music
> itself, came from New Orleans, so most people supposed, wrongly, that
> the word came from there as well.  The Wikipedia article,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(word), which is largely written by
> me, discusses the history in more detail.
>
>
> John Baker
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
> Of Wilson Gray
> Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2008 5:34 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
>
> Under the historical circumstances, it's surprising that the word has
> ever come to have any association with blacks and/or their music at all!
> How in the world did that come about?
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 5:08 PM, 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:      Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > ---------
> >
> > The earliest occurrence in HDAS of "jazz" = "fuck" comes from 1918,
> an
> entry in a diary kept by John dos Passos, and of course not published
> until years afterwards.
> >
> > I have been supposing that this sense arose because 1) one of the two
> original sense of "jazz" was "vigor", "energy", "enthusiasm" &c, and
> that words meaning vigor, energy, &c. are likely to come to mean sexual
> vigor, enery, &c.; and 2) the dancing that young people did to jazz
> music involved full-body contact and was supposed by the upright to be
> a
> precursor to fornication.  (When some tea-rooms began offering late
> afternoon dance music, there was an outburst of deploration; but one
> family-values faker opined that he didn't mind daylight dancing. so long
> as there was daylight between the dancers.)  This 1915 passage surely
> indicates that the word by then also meant "messed up", "bungled", made
> a hash of", or something.  Not, however, "fucked up", because if the
> editor of that newspaper thought that that would be an association made
> by his readers, he would not have allowed the word to be printed --
> unless he was tired of newspaper work and ready for a career change.
> >
> > In all of the 1912/1913 passages containing "jazz", the word can
> easily be replaced with "energy" or "nonsense".
> >
> > Boies Spring was the source of "jazz" water -- it was a health resort
> built around a spring of naturally effervescent water, and the 1913
> occurrences of "jazz" nearly all come from accounts of the SF Seals
> baseball teams, during its spring training there or from their regular
> season games.  Art Hickman seems to have been the first musician to
> apply the word "jazz" to music, and he was entertainment director at
> Boies Spring during the spring of 1913.
> > I don't have access to the digitized Chronicle.  It would be
> interesting to search it for references to Boies Spring, say 1911 to
> 1915.   A couple of years after 1913, Hickman was hired to lead a dance
> band at a very fashionable hotel in SF.  I have been able to look over
> a
> society magazine from SF in the mid 1910s, and have seen ads for the
> ball room at this hotel and then for Hickman's band there, but haven't
> yet seen anything using the word "jazz".  It would be interesting to
> search for Hicxkman.
> > Given the fact that the Proquest OCR has such a high failure rate in
> turning up what is in fact there, it's possible that searching for Boies
> Spring or Hickman would turn up some stories in fact containing the word
> jazz.
> >
> > As it happens, the only actual contemporary connection now known
> between Hickman and the word "jazz" is from an interview from the late
> 1910s in which he repudiated the word.  By then jazz music had become
> a
> vaudeville and cabaret fad, and jazz musicians posed as purely
> instinctive musicians, everyone in the band playing what sounded good
> to
> him, the result being a sort of pleasingly energetic cacophony.  This
> wasn't what Hickman was about.  He and his musicians were highly skilled
> and played very elaborate arrangements.  His trademark had become
> compromised.
> >
> > GAT
> >
> > George A. Thompson
> > Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org