A local university is marketing Chicago as a place to study, and they wrote, "The word jazz was coined in Chicago." I knew we'd discussed the word here, though I couldn't find that we'd actually talked about how it was first coined.

The OED says that it was first applied to music in Chicago, though it was first heard in California in a baseball context (what is that context?), and as college slang. This was apparently around 1913. The OED says the phrase "jazz band" was first used by Bert Kelly in Chicago in the fall of 1915. Does anyone know what that earliest context referred to (the Californian one), a little more specifically?

It seems to have an interesting history, at any rate. We've discussed its use with sexual meanings here, though the OED says that the suggestion that the sexual sense was primary is unlikely. Interestingly, a derivation from French is jaser (earlier is gaser, which refers to birdsong), which means "to chatter" or "gossip," and it (or a homonym) is occasionally used with reference to sexual activity. That must be the sexual context.

An African link, from Jas, Jass, Jaz, Jazz, Jasz and Jascz, was apparently invented by the author in a 1917 article in the Sun (N.Y., 5 Aug. III.3/6). So the link to slavery that you sometimes hear is apparently not true.

Does anyone else know more about the word jazz?

Quotes from Classic Jazz, by Scott Yanow, 2001:

(p. iv)

• According to the stereotypical, not totally accurate, story of the beginnings of jazz, jazz came from ragtime and the blues, was born in New Orleans, and quickly became Dixieland. With the closing of New Orleans' red-light Storyville district in 1917, so the myth continues, most of the top New Orleans musicians went up the Mississippi to Chicago and eventually east to New York, spreading the joy of Dixieland worldwide throughout the roaring '20s. The music is then supposed to have served as the perfect soundtrack for wearing raccoon coats, dancing the Charleston, sitting on flagpoles, and drinking bootleg gin in speakeasies. The balloon burst in 1929 with the Wall Street crash. The final blow to early Dixieland was the end of Prohibition, leading to the rise in the mid-1930s of more sophisticated swing big bands, or so the story goes.
  
  (p. iv)
• But the real story of the origins of jazz is quite a bit different and more complex. Jazz, ragtime, and the blues were all actually born about the same time (Buddy Bolden became prominent before Scott Joplin), New Orleans was not necessarily jazz's only birthplace, few muscians who were not pianists worked regularly in the Storyville bordellos, and the Mississippi River does not go all the way north to Chicago? Most importantly, Dixieland was only one aspect of the 1920s jazz scene, and mid-1030s swing was not necessarily more sophisticated than the music of the previous decade.
  
  (p. 1)
• Scholars, musicians, and fans have tried for decades to define what jazz is and isn't. The problem is that jazz continues to evolve and a definition that fits today will seem overly restrictive ten years from now. The closest I have been able to come in defining this very vital music, which ranges from classic jazz and bebop to the avant-garde and fusion, is that jazz is a type of music that emphasizes improvisations and always has the feeling of the blues. The "feeling of the blues" refers to bending notes and putting one's soul into the music, rather than actually playing a 12-bar blues
  
  (p. 1)
• Because jazz was born over 20 years before it was ever recorded, there is not one obvious moment in history that we can point to as the birth of jazz. Symbolically, when Buddy Bolden (jazz's first star) formed his first band in 1895, jazz could be said to have solidified and been born, but it probably existed in rudimentary form a little earlier.'
  
  (p.1)
• Jazz in the late 1800s drew from the many types of music that were around.
  
  (p.2)
• The first jazz recordings were not made until 1917, so the music's first two decades went completely undocumented. Until around 1910, jazz was mostly confined to the southern United States, with New Orleans as its center.
• 
  
  (p. 4)
• 1902 This was the year that Jelly Roll Morton (then 16) would later claim to have invented jazz.
  
  (p. 4)
• 1909 Bill Johnson leaves New Orleans, introducing jazz to California.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: tinman,

quote:

Symbolically, when Buddy Bolden (jazz's first star) formed his first band in 1895, jazz could be said to have solidified and been born, but it probably existed in rudimentary form a little earlier.'

I had heard that one of Bolden's band members claimed that the bank did make a recording - doubtless a cylinder - before WW1. But this Holy Grail of the Jazz world remains infuriatingly lost.

Edit. I see that Wikipedia agrees with my memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Bolden

From p. 3 of Classic Jazz: "Although he allegedly recorded a cylinder in 1898, no recording of Bolden has ever been found."