WoW! This is not a techy's blog! Let us listen Jazz!

It is very difficult to define what is a Jazz style? But it is the one which gave a lot of room for improvisation! Let us see'n hear one nice Jazz Show!



The origin of the word jazz is one of the most sought-after word origins in modern American English. The word's intrinsic interest — the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century — has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well-documented. As discussed in more detail below, jazz began as a West Coast slang term around 1912, the meaning of which varied but which did not refer to music or sex. Jazz came to mean jazz music in Chicago around 1915. Jazz was played in New Orleans prior to that time but was not called jazz.

azz began to be applied to music in Chicago, around 1915. The earliest known attestation, found by Yale Book of Quotations editor Fred R. Shapiro, is from the Chicago Daily Tribune on July 11, 1915:

Blues Is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues . . . The Worm 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. . . . At the next place a young woman was keeping "Der Wacht Am Rhein" and "Tipperary Mary" apart when the interrogator entered. "What are the blues?" he asked gently. "Jazz!" The young woman's voice rose high to drown the piano. . . . The blues are never written into 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." . . . 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 decollate things that give the throat and windpipe full play, so that the notes that issue from the tubes may not suffer for want of blues--those wonderful blues.

Examples in Chicago sources continued over the next year, with the term beginning to extend to other cities by the end of 1916. By 1917 the term was in widespread use. The first known use in New Orleans, discovered by lexicographer Benjamin Zimmer in 2009, appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on Nov. 14, 1916:[1]

Theatrical journals have taken cognizance of the "jas bands" and at first these organizations of syncopation were credited with having originated in Chicago, but any one ever having frequented the "tango belt" of New Orleans knows that the real home of the "jas bands" is right here. However, it remains for the artisans of the stage to give formal recognition to the "jas bands" of New Orleans. The day of the "Stage Workers" annual masquerade ball, which is November 23, the stage employes of the city are going to traverse the city led by a genuine and typical "jas band." Just where and when these bands, until this winter known only to New Orleans, originated, is a disputed question. It is claimed they are the outgrowth of the so-called "fish bands" of the lake front camps, Saturday and Sunday night affairs.
However, the fact remains that their popularity has already reached Chicago, and that New York probably will be invaded next. But, be that as it may, the fact remains the only and original are to be found here and here alone. The "boys behind the scenes" have named their parade the "Jas parade." It's going to be an automobile affair with the actors and actresses of the various theaters right behind the band. The ball is to be at the Washington Artillery.

It is not clear who first applied jazz to music. A leading contender is Bert Kelly, a musician and bandleader who was familiar with the California slang term from being a banjoist with Art Hickman's orchestra. Kelly formed Bert Kelly's Jazz Band and claimed in a letter published in Variety on October 2, 1957, that he had begun using "the Far West slangword 'jazz,' as a name for an original dance band" in 1914. Kelly's claim is considered plausible but lacks contemporary verification, although the Literary Digest wrote on April 26, 1919, that "[t]he phrase 'jazz band' was first used by Bert Kelly in Chicago in the fall of 1915, and was unknown in New Orleans."

Other important early claimants include the band of Tom Brown, a trombonist who fronted an early New Orleans band in Chicago in 1915 and claimed to be the first to be billed as a "Jass Band". Slightly later was The Original Dixieland Jass Band (or, in some accounts, a predecessor band named Stein's Dixie Jass Band), allegedly so named by Chicago cafe manager Harry James. According to a November 1937 article in Song Lyrics, "A dance-crazed couple shouted at the end of a dance, 'Jass it up boy, give us some more jass.' Promoter Harry James immediately grasped this word as the perfect monicker for popularizing the new craze."

There is insufficient contemporary evidence to determine definitively the relative merits of these two claims. However, if the chronology given at Original Dixieland Jass Band is correct, it did not receive the jass name until March 3, 1916, which would be too late for it to be the originator. In a 1917 court case concerning tune copyrights, various members of what became the O.D.J.B. testified under oath that the band opened in Chicago under the name "Stein's Dixie Jass Band".DuBose Heyward, author of Porgy, in his book Jasbo Brown and Selected Poems (1924), states that the Jazz music genre had possibly taken its name from Jazbo Brown, an "itinerant negro player along the Mississippi and later in Chicago cabarets".