Bert Kelly's Jaz Band (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Baker, John]

        That's probably quite relevant.  Wikipedia includes the
following statement:  "Ray Lopez of Tom Brown's 1915 band recalled he
and his fellow musicians assumed that the word "jass" or "jazz" was too
improper to be printed in newspapers so they looked in a dictionary for
similar words like "jade"; rediscovered newspaper advertisements from
the era for Brown's "Jad Band" or "Jab Band" are suggestive of
confirmation of this account."  The sentence has a "citation needed"
note, so I don't know the source of the claim (while I am the principal
author of the Wikipedia article on Jazz (word), I did not write this
particular sentence).

        Can you share the relevant text?  If "jad" really should mean
"jazz" here, it would be the earliest use of the term to refer to music.


John Baker



-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Jesse Sheidlower
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 11:30 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Bert Kelly's Jaz Band (UNCLASSIFIED)


The OED does have a quotation from May 1915 in the Chicago
Examiner for _jad orchestra_. It's not clear what this
represents, but I've seen the page image and there's no
question of what it is; the context is the same as similar
advertisements for jazz bands.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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