The Word "Jazz," 7 of 7—Summary, Debunking False Theories, and Conclusions

(For the previous essays in this series, see the Index. The detailed evidence, with many vintage newspaper clippings, is presented in parts 1 through 6. However, if you only read one of these essays, this is the one that stands alone and summarizes my findings.)

In this series I have traced the word “jazz” from its origins to about 1916. After that, the word “jazz” was so widely used for music, as well as for its original meanings of “energy” and the like, that it would be impossible, and unnecessary, to review every instance of it. Now, as I will show today, all of the popular stories about the origin of the word are wrong—and I do mean all! Word origins seems to be one of those fields where everybody thinks he or she is an expert. One reason that there are so many false theories about the origin of “jazz” is that fans, not trained in etymology, have gone looking for any words that sound like “jazz.” They found slightly similar sounds in French, in some African languages, and elsewhere. But finding a word that sounds similar, although it is part of the work, is not the key—one has to follow the path of that word, find the “paper trail,” as we’ve done throughout this series. And there’s even more work required, as we’ll explain:

When I posted a preliminary essay on the word “jazz” in 2018 (don’t look for it—this series completely replaces that), I received an email from a proud Irish-American saying that “jazz” came from the Irish language, also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic. (It seems that most people have an agenda to go with their theories about the word.) The reader got that idea from the late Daniel Cassidy’s book, How the Irish Invented Slang (2007). However, Cassidy was not a trained linguist, and his book has been completely discredited by knowledgeable researchers.

Cassidy himself told the New York Times that, “leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents [“sound-alikes”] of the terms which English dictionaries described as having ‘unknown origin.’” But that is precisely the layperson’s error that I described above. Significantly, Cassidy did not speak Irish himself, was unfamiliar with the grammatical rules, and he even mis-pronounced many of the words that he claimed to be meaningful sound-alikes! There are many devastatingly bad reviews of the book, such as this one, and even a site devoted to debunking Cassidy’s claims one by one, from someone who knows the Irish language. (Neither of these authors is aware of the origins of “jazz,” but their general points are very solid.) I would like to quote for you from another review, by Grant Barrett, a respected professional linguist and lexicographer for Dictionary.com and many other reference works, because he explains how this kind of research is actually done:

…“Cassidy’s primary mistake: he has wrongly assumed that similar spellings or pronunciations between words prove a connection. They do not…spelling and phonetic similarities must be looked at, but they are simply a starting point. They prove nothing. They merely provide a clue to be investigated by gathering evidence for and against the connection. Evidence. Above all, Cassidy needs to support his claims with published evidence that shows the etymological path. Dated, continuous, in-context quotations from any written source will always be superior evidence over phonetic speculation based upon national, linguistic, or ethnic pride…[Typical evidence would be] borrowed words set off by quotes, dashes, or italics, or explained as “as my gram [grandma] used to say,” or “as we used to say,” or even given plainly by a regular person as a word from another language, and so forth. In order to prove Cassidy’s claims, primary source material that might contain these sorts of statements needs to be found and examined: letters, books, diaries, newspapers, what have you. If the words he’s writing about really did come from Irish Gaelic, the only way to prove it is to find those Irish words repeatedly showing up in some form in print in English-language contexts.

And, when the experts looked for evidence supporting Cassidy’s guesses—for they were indeed only guesses—they found nothing. His origin story for “jazz” is wrongly based on an Irish word which knowledgeable people say is Not pronounced like “jazz.”

More generally, the problem is that there are many words in different languages that sound similar to each other but are absolutely not related. For example, the French word for four, “quatre,” often sounds like “cat” when pronounced by a native French speaker. (Try typing “quatre” into Google, and then click on the audio.) Do you seriously believe that that proves that our word “cat” came from the French word for “four”?! A trained etymologist must be familiar with many languages, and with the histories of languages, and with the movements of peoples, so as to know whether one language influenced the other. And he or she knows how words develop and are formed. For example, it is absolutely false that “golf” comes from an acronym of “Gentleman only, ladies forbidden”—not only because there are potential sources for the word in Scottish and Dutch languages, but because experts know that words were not formed from acronyms until after about 1900. Generally, theories that older words began as acronyms are 100% false.

From now on, whenever someone tells you their own “theory” about the origin of the word “jazz,” or the story that a revered older musician told them, please evaluate it against the five main points that I have stressed throughout this series, with lots of evidence:

1. The word “jazz” is first documented in 1912, and it evolved from a slang word, “jasm,” sometimes spelled “jazzum” or “jassum,” meaning liveliness, “pep,” energy, intensity, and related concepts.

2. All Other Tales about the origin of the word “jazz” are 100% false and are not supported by any evidence or research. Again, I said ALL.

3.  It is not true that the word was originally spelled “jass.” From 1912 on, it was spelled equally “jazz” and “jass,” and sometimes other spellings such as “jas” and “jaz,” until the “...zz” version became standard during the early 1920s.

4. Initially the word was not connected with music. A few months before July 1915, “jazz” became the name for a type of music in Chicago, and possibly California and elsewhere. Bands started using “jazz” in their names soon after, and by December 1916 that was common. The music was named “jazz” by white Americans, as Duke Ellington (b.1899) and Max Roach (b.1924) and many other older musicians correctly and repeatedly claimed. And it was a compliment, not an insult. It meant that the music was lively and energetic.

5. The word was not invented by Black Americans and it is not from New Orleans. Therefore, it does not come from African languages, nor from the French as spoken in New Orleans.

THIS MEANS:

Stories that date the word back to the 1850s or so are False.

Stories that try to relate “jazz” to French, African languages or the Irish language are all entirely false.

There is no truth to the ideas that “jazz” came from “Jasbo,” “jaser,””Jasper,” “Jezebel,” and so on—all are wrong, and based on nothing but hearsay and imagination, and zero research. The idea that John Streckfus’s riverboat was announced by yelling "the J.S. is coming," and that that became the word “jazz,” is complete nonsense.

Some that say the word was started in New Orleans by… STOP right there. The word was absolutely not from New Orleans. As noted by the late jazz historian Lawrence Gushee, perhaps the foremost expert on early jazz, the original New Orleans jazz musicians said that the word “jazz” was not used there during the formative years. The first generation of New Orleans musicians, mostly born between about 1880 and 1901 were documented in hundreds of interviews, notably the large series conducted for the Hogan Archive at Tulane University starting in 1958. Gushee studied many of these interviews and noted that the musicians said they first heard the word “jazz” up north (usually meaning Chicago).  Even Tom Brown, the New Orleans trombonist who claimed to have named the first “jazz band” in 1915 in Chicago, said that he learned the word there, not in New Orleans. In fact the first known printed use of the word in New Orleans that refers to music is from 1916, after it was already in use everywhere else.

So, what did they call the music in New Orleans? They were adding improvisations to ragtime and dance music, and so on, so they would often refer to their own repertory simply as “ragtime” or “dance music,” meaning their own versions of these. Significantly, this is yet more evidence that Ellington and Roach were right when they said the music was named by white people, not by the Black musicians who created it. Even Sidney Bechet (b.1897), in his autobiography (p.3), wrote, “Jazz, that’s a name the white people have given to the music.” Why should we ignore these artists? They knew what they were talking about, and in the case of Ellington and Bechet, had lived through it.

But people are very inconsistent. (I know, that’s a shocker, isn’t it?) The same people who proudly tell me, wrongly, that such and such Black musician in New Orleans invented the word, also tell me “I can’t believe that white people foisted this insulting word on this great Black music!” I guess that’s called “trying to have it both ways.”

But, please remember, stories that say “jazz” was an insulting and disreputable word for sex are also False. The word was published in Every newspaper, major and minor, all over the world, and it was never censored. When white people first applied it to the music, it was positive advertising, not negative. It appears that beginning in 1918 or later, in some circles it was used as a euphemism for “sex,” but that was never common—that has never been its main meaning, and certainly is not what it meant to all those hundreds of newspaper writers. (People might be confusing it with "gism” or “jizz” which may have been the original source of “jazz,” but then went on to evolve separately. “Gism” eventually did and still does mean “semen.” But “jazz” did not and does not.)

The story that it was first spelled “jass” and that people covered up the “j” to make fun of it is false. The first spelling ever found is “jazz.” Besides, what would they have covered up? The little ads in the newspapers?

One of the most ridiculous stories of the origin of “jazz” is the idea presented in the Ken Burns documentary series, that “jazz” is short for the jasmine perfume that some New Orleans prostitutes wore. Remember, the word is not from New Orleans—and there are many other reasons that this makes no sense: The music was not as connected with prostitution as is commonly assumed—the brothels occasionally hired solo pianists, and almost never bands. And “jasmine” is a short enough word that there is no need to shorten it further. And so on. But first and foremost, the word “jazz” did not come from New Orleans—that should be the end of the discussion!

I know from experience that many of my readers will have their own favorite theories —please, let go of them!

It is also worth noting that the general public applied the word jazz in the 1920s to basically any type of dance music, including quite a bit of dance music that we would not consider jazz today. This means for example, that when F. Scott Fitzgerald published his Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922, he did not mean that the average European American was hip to the few existing recordings by Black artists! His title simply meant that the latest dance music, “jazz,” had become a symbol for that generation, just as rock music was for young people in the late 1950s and into the 1960s.

However, it’s worth acknowledging that even though “jazz” did not mean “sex,” it did mean “pep, energy” and so on. So it was in any case a kind of frivolous name, almost a “silly” name, for a type of music. Did the word stand in the way of many “respectable” people, white and also religious black Americans, from accepting this new kind of music? Absolutely yes. It certainly seems to be true, as Duke, Max, Bechet and so many more Black artists have felt, that the word held the music back, and it's totally understandable that many Black artists such as my late acquaintance, pianist and broadcaster Billy Taylor, campaigned to have the name changed. (Billy preferred “America's Classical Music.”)

When I first started teaching in colleges in January 1977 it was clear that the name itself was disrespected by many European Americans—mostly older folks, but some younger ones too. However, my experience with college students since the early 1990s is that not only do they not look down on the word “jazz,” they have never even heard of people looking down on it, and they are astounded to learn that that used to be the case. “It’s not what I like,” they’ll say, “but everyone knows that ‘jazz’ refers to a very complex and sophisticated type of music.”

Yet there are still musicians calling for a new name for our music to replace “jazz.” Trumpeter (and keyboardist) Nicholas Payton has been writing about this since 2011. And trumpeter/composer Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah began to find the term jazz “limiting,” according to a Newsweek profile in 2017, so he created a new name, “stretch music,” for a sound free of artificial and arbitrary boundaries.

Calling for a change in the name of our music seems to be a recurring event, but obviously it could only happen if everyone on the planet agreed to it, which is an impossibility. In any case, the need is long past. Jazz is generally admired now, in my experience. And the word “jazz” is here to stay.

All the best,
Lewis