The jazz party is undoubtedly a reference to the fact that the Seals had hired Art Hickman’s Orchestra to play for them in the evenings at Boyes Springs. Hickman’s band played what was then known as ragtime or swing and following their engagement by the Seals were hired to play at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Hickman was one of the white early adopters of the ragtime musical style being played by Black musicians out of New Orleans. This phrase jazz party here seems to denote a lively affair rather than one where jazz music is played, but jazz music was in fact played there. So, it’s not a use of the word as a label for the music, but it comes close. Ironically, given his role in naming the genre, Hickman did not like jazz as a label for his music and never used it himself.
The next day we get a published use of jazz by someone other than Gleeson. Francis J. Mannix writes in the Bulletin of 25 March 1913 and specifically connects jazz to Hickman’s band:
Art Hickman, the jovial dispenser of mirth at the springs, met the guests at Verano with a giant gas buggy and brought them over to the hotel, where a great repast was spread in their honor. The old “jazz” was introduced to the boys, and the key of the place—some difficulty was found in locating it—turned over to them.
By 30 April 1913 we see another California paper, the Sacramento Bee, use jazz, again in reference to the Seals who were imparting jazz to the opposing Sacramento Senators (a.k.a. the Solons):
When last we saw the Senators, they were an amiable, uncomplaining set of tossers, willing to accomodiate [sic] almost any team with four or five games, or even an entire series if it was needed badly. But the club under Wolverton has wrought an unmistakable change in their deportment. There is about them now a suggestion of aggressiveness which has all the earmarks of the original old “jazz,” and the San Francisco fans were not slow to recognize it.
“Some team, that!” “Likely looking bunch!” “They’ll be heard from soon,” were samples of the comments.
The “jazz” was in evidence all over the field. Tommy Tennant, erstwhile idol of the Seal fans, set the pace for the noise-makers and his colleagues chimed in with a chorus of cheer-up stuff that did not terminate until the last man was out in the final frame.
Within a few months, we start to see newspaper articles about current slang include jazz as a term coming out of San Francisco, indicating that the word had achieved a wider currency, at least regionally in the Bay Area. There is this article in the Idaho Statesman of 5 June 1913 that bears a dateline reporting from Indiana:
San Francisco—“Are you jerry to the old jazz?”
[…]
Now out in San Francisco, the most popular word is “the old jazz.” It means anything you may happen to want it to.
And there is this article which appears in the 22 June 1913 issue of the Duluth News Tribune. The article appears to be a reworking of the same piece that had appeared in the Idaho paper a few weeks before. The article is distinctly different from the 5 June piece, but much of the phrasing is the same:
Take Frisco, the great slang factory of this broad land. Out there they ask you, “Are you jerry to the old jazz?” meaning thereby, “Are you hep to the—” whatever you are supposed to be hep to. “Jazz” stands for whatever you want it to.
We had started to see the transition from baseball to music in the 1913 coverage of the Seals, but none of that reporting used jazz definitively as the label for the genre of music, then primarily known as ragtime or swing.
We have indirect evidence that jazz was being used to refer to the music as early as 1914 and that there was at least one band that incorporated it into its name by that year, Bert Kelly’s Jazz Band that played at the College Inn in Chicago. But we have no surviving uses in print of the word referring definitively to the music until 1915.
From 15 May to 28 August 1915 a group billed as Tom Brown’s Band from Dixie Land played at Lamb’s Café in Chicago, a popular dance spot. And on 22 May 1915, the following advertisement appeared in the Chicago Examiner:
Lambs’ Café
The Original
JAD ORCHESTRA
For Dancing
Randolph and Clark Sts.
JAD here is almost certainly a misprint for jazz, the word not yet being familiar to the paper’s typesetters. Later appearances of the ad do not use the word. But we do get a clear use of jazz to refer to music in the Chicago Daily Tribune of 11 July 1915:
The Worm [i.e., woman’s husband] had turned—turned to fox trotting. And the “blues” had done it. The “jazz” had put pep into the legs that had scrambled too long for the 5:15.
What mattered to him now the sly smiles of contempt that his friends uncorked when he essayed the foxy trot a month before; what mattered it whose shins he kicked?
That was what “blue” music had done for him.
[…]
“What are the blues?” he asked gently.
“Jazz!” The young woman’s voice rose high to drown the piano.
A tall young man with nimble fingers rose from the piano and came over. “That’s me,” he said. And then he unraveled the mystery of the “blues.”
“A blue note is a sour note,” he explained. “It’s a discord—a harmonic discord. The blues are never written into the music, but are interpolated by the piano player or other players. They aren’t new. They are just reborn into popularity. They started in the south half a century ago and are the interpolations of darkies originally. The trade name for them is “jazz.”
“There’s a craze for them now. People find them excellent for dancing. Piano players are taking lessons to learn how to play them.”
Thereupon “Jazz” Marion sat down and showed the bluest streak of blues ever heard beneath the blue. Or, if you like this better: “Blue” Marion sat down and jazzed the jazziest streak of jazz ever.
Saxophone players since the advent of the “jazz blues” have taken to wearing “jazz collars,” neat decollete things that give the throat and windpipe full play, so that the notes that issue from the tubas may not suffer for want of blues—those wonderful blues.
Try it some time—for that tired feeling—the blues.
Clearly, it was in Chicago in 1915 that the term jazz became indelibly associated with the musical genre. Years later, musician Bert Kelly would claim to have been the first to use jazz to refer to the musical genre. Kelly had played in Hickman’s band in 1913, subsequently moving east to Chicago to start his own group. Kelly writes in a letter published in Variety on 2 October 1957:
As I conceived the idea of using the Far West slangword, “jazz,” as a name for an original dance band and my original dance band and my original style of playing a dance rhythm, at the College Inn, Chicago, in 1914, it is my wish to unravel the skein of ridiculous falsehoods concocted by overanxious writers, publishers and music critics who start with the erroneous premise that the jazz-band and jazz style of dance music were originated in New Orleans and the etymology of the word jazz could be found in New Orleans or Africa instead of in the ’49ers mining-camp dancehalls of the Far West.
[…]
When I originated the jazz band in 1914, there were just three dance bands of any note to the music and theatrical world in America, namely: Bert Kelly’s Jazz Band at The College Inn, Chicago; Earl Fuller’s Orchestra at Rector’s in New York; and Art Hickman’s Orchestra at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
Backing up the San Francisco to Chicago trail is this description of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band on a cover sheet for a 1917 Victor Records catalog:
New Victor Records
Jass Band and other Dance Selections
The Original Dixieland Jass Band
SPELL it Jass, Jas, Jaz or Jazz—nothing can spoil a Jass band. Some say the Jass band originated in Chicago. Chicago says it comes from San Francisco—San Francisco being away off across the continent. Anyway, a Jass band is the newest thing in the cabarets, adding greatly to the hilarity thereof.
Kelly was undoubtedly among the first to use jazz as a label for the musical genre, but it is unlikely he was the only one. There is indirect evidence that the term had already migrated to New Orleans with other musicians by 1914. Also note, that when Kelly writes that his was one of only “bands of any note” he is referring to white musicians. There were many Black musicians playing jazz music in New Orleans and elsewhere.
The indirect evidence for the wider spread of the term comes in a pair of 1916 articles in Variety. The first, in the 27 October 1916 issue, makes the claim that jazz originated in Chicago:
Chicago, the home of “Walkin’ the Dog,” “Ballin’ the Jack” and sundry other cabaret features, has added another innovation to its list of discoveries in the so-called “Jazz Bands.” The Jazz Band is composed of three or more instruments and seldom plays regulated music. The College Inn and practically all other high class places of entertainment have a Jazz Band featured, while the low cost makes it possible for all the smaller places to carry their Jazz orchestra. A number of the organizations are reported to be considering the possibilities of invading New York and it would not be surprising to note the disappearance of the classical orchestras for the syncopated groups.
The following week, on 3 November 1916, Variety’s New Orleans correspondent posted a reply indicating that musical style had been played there for decades and the term jazz itself had been known in New Orleans for several years:
Chicago’s claim to originating “Jazz Bands” and “Balling the Jack” are as groundless, according to VARIETY’s New Orlean’s [sic] correspondent, as ’Frisco’s assuming to be the locale for the first “Todolo” and “Turkey Trot” dances. Little negro tots were “Ballin’ the Jack” in New Orleans over ten years ago, and negro roustabouts were “Turkey Trotting" and doing the “Todolo” in New Orleans as far back as 1890, he says. “Jazz Bands” have been popular there for over two years, and Chicago cabaret owners brought entertainers from that city to introduce the idea. New Orleans’ “Brown Skin” dance is also to be instituted in the Windy City shortly, is the claim.
And the same issue of Variety contains this note, also from the New Orleans correspondent:
Herb Trustee, long the foremost exponent of the “Jazz” in the local cabarets, left here [i.e., New Orleans] Sunday to join the Amy Butler act at Cleveland.
Further evidence can be found in the reminiscences of musician Nick La Rocca, who, in the journal Song Lyrics for November 1937, recalled being introduced to the term jass at the Schiller Club in Chicago in 1914:
“It was at this place,” said La Rocca as he observed the magnificence of his NBC surroundings, “that I heard the word ‘jass’ (later spelled ‘jazz’) for the first time. It happened this way: A dance-crazed couple shouted at the end of the dance, ‘Jass it up boy, give us some more jass.’ Promoter Harry James immediately grasped this word as the perfect monicker [sic] for popularizing the new craze.”
If La Rocca’s memory is correct, James was the first man to use the word “jass” in connection with an orchestra. He called his headliner the “Original Dixieland Jass Band.”
“There is no doubt in my mind,” said La Rocca, “that the word ‘jazz’ is Northern in origin, for I had never heard the word before that specific night at the Schiller Café in Chicago.”
There you have it. Jazz originated as a slang term for energy and enthusiasm among California baseball players in 1912–13, and through a band hired to entertain the San Francisco Seals baseball team during 1913 spring training, it became associated with and a name for what had up to that point been labeled ragtime or swing music.
There are a number of origin stories for jazz that are often repeated. These have little or no evidentiary support. As we have seen, while the musical style flowed out of New Orleans, the name jazz did not. Some have tried to make connections to various, sometimes fictitious, West African words. While this makes sense as a hypothesis if jazz were to have started among Black musicians in New Orleans, the origin in white California baseball makes an African origin unlikely. Another claim conflates the sexual sense of jasm/jism with jazz. While a sexual connotation cannot be ruled out, the timeline of the development of the senses militates against it. Similarly, the explanations that the term comes from a New Orleans prostitute named Jezebel or from jasmine perfume worn by prostitutes in that city are pure invention. Jazz is also sometimes associated with a supposed Black musician named Jasbo Brown, but he is fictitious, and the tale was invented as a post hoc explanation. Finally, claims that jazz comes from the Middle French jaser, meaning to chatter or gossip, or the Irish teas, meaning heat, are absurd on their face.
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