Jazz (pronounced jaz)
(1) A style of music of African-American origin, said to
have emerged in New Orleans early in the twentieth century.
(2) A style of dance music, popular especially in the
1920s, arranged for a large band and marked by some of the features of jazz.
(3) Dancing or a dance performed to such music, as with jerky
bodily motions and gestures.
(4) In slang (1) liveliness; spirit; excitement, (2) insincere,
exaggerated, or pretentious talk & (3) similar or related but unspecified
things or activities (often in the form “…and all that jazz”) which can be used
negatively if referring to rigmarole, red-tape etc.
(5) Of or relating to or characteristic of jazz; to play
(music) in the manner of jazz.
(6) To excite or enliven; to accelerate (often in the
form “jazz up”).
(7) In vulgar slang, copulation.
1912: An invention of US English of uncertain origin. Until around the end of the World War I, the alternative spellings jaz, jas, jass & jasz were used. The first documented use of the word jazz was in 1912 in the context of writing about baseball baseball, the use extending to the musical form in 1915 when it was used in reference to Tom Brown's all-white band out of New Orleans (although there are sources which date it either from a 1917 advertisement in a Chicago newspaper for Bert Kelly's Jaz Band).
Lindsay Lohan watching NBA game between Utah Jazz and LA Lakers, Los Angeles November, 2006.
The etymology
has attracted much research but the findings have been inconclusive, the most
popular theory being jazz was a variant of jism
& jasm (from 1842 & 1860
respectively), archaic nineteenth century US slang meaning “zest for
accomplishment; drive; dynamism”, the qualities apparently most often ascribed
to women), also words of unknown origin.
That evolutionary path is tangled up with the sexual connotations once
associated with the word jazz and etymologists stress the sequence is
important. At the turn of the twentieth
century, "gism" certainly meant "vitality" but also
"virility" and this (by 1899) led to the slang use for "semen"
but, the etymologists caution, while a similar evolution happened to the word
"jazz" (which became slang for the act of sex), that use was unknown
prior to 1918 so any sexual connotation wasn’t attached at the point of origin
but acquired later. The use in reference
to baseball is thought to have been among white Americans and this may also have
been the case in the earliest uses with the musical form. Overlaying all this, nor is it known whether
the evolution to jazz was organic, an invention or an imperfect echoic.
Duke Ellington, Ellington At Newport (1956).
While ethno-musicologists
note the way the form has evolved over a century as diverse influences have
variously been absorbed, assimilated or interpolated, the profession regards
the core of Jazz to be a form rooted in West African cultural and musical
expression which borrowed from the unique African American blues tradition. Technically, the most distinct characteristics
are blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms and, most
celebrated of all, improvisation. As
jazz was influenced, so jazz influenced and there was no musical form so
associated with the “fusion movement” (better understood as a number movements)
which was a feature of the experimental (and increasingly commercial) output of
the decades after the World War II, a trend which produced an array of labels
including acid jazz, cool jazz, jazzbo, jazz-funk, jazz fusion, trad-jazz, jazz-rock
and more.
Count Basie And His Orchestra, April In Paris (1957).
In
idiomatic use context matters much because to jazz something can mean “to destroy”
whereas to “jazz up” is to enliven, brighten up, make more colorful etc but
this can be good or bad, the familiar phrase “don’t jazz it up to much” a
caution against excessive bling or needless complication. The use in vulgar slang is now listed by most
dictionaries as either archaic or obsolete but when it use it covered a wide
range from (1) the act of copulation, (2) to prostitute oneself for money &
(3) semen. As an intransitive verb it
meant to move about in a lively or frivolous manner or “to fool around”, the
origin of this assumed to be the uninhibited style of dancing sometimes
associated with the genre. To jazz someone
can also be to distract or pester them or provide misleading or incorrect
information (which can be referred to using the noun “the jazz”). As applied simply to music, it can mean
either to play jazz music (in some set form or in a jam) or to dance to jazz
music
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1959).
The meaning
"rubbish, unnecessary talk or ornamentation" dates from 1918, a use
reflecting the snobby attitude many had towards a form of music which sometimes
didn’t observe the usual conventions of structure. The term “all that jazz” (sometimes cited as
a synonym for “et cetera” but actually extending to ”similar or related but
unspecified things or activities" was first recorded in 1939 although the extent
of its history in oral use is unknown. The
verb jazz in the sense of “to speed or liven up” dates from 1917 and was used
often as “jazzed” or “jazzing”. The “jazz
age” was first described in 1921 and soon popularized in the writings of F
Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and the era is usually regarded as the years
between the end of World War I (1918) and the Wall Street crash of 1929. The phrase captures both what was seen as the
accelerating pace of life in 1920s America and the popularity of the music.
Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um (1959).
The noun razzmatazz was interesting because it was used in the late nineteenth century to mean various things (most often something fanciful and showy) and thus obviously pre-dated jazz but, presumably because of the rhyming quality it picked up early associations with jazz which by the 1930s had become a disparaging critique ("old-fashioned jazz" especially in contrast to the newer “swing”). Dating from 1917, the noun jazzbo (low, vulgar jazz) was a disparaging term to describe both the music and musicians; later in the twentieth century it was applied as derogatory term for African-Americans (and others with dark skins) but use soon died out. The adjective jazzy (resembling jazz music) dates from 1918 and was often used in the forms “jazzily” & “jazziness”, use quickly extending from music to a general term suggesting “spirited, lively; exciting”. The noun jazzetry (poetry reading accompanied by jazz music) came into use in 1959 and was part of the cultural ephemera of the beat generation. The noun Jazzercise (the construct being jazz + (ex)ercise) was originally a proprietary name from the commercial fitness industry which, despite the implications, was used to describe routines using just about any form of music.
Lotus Jazz, 1985.
So unsuccessful was the marketing strategy used for Lotus Jazz that it’s said to rate with Ford’s Edsel and Coca-Cola's New Coke among the most popular case studies chosen by students of the discipline to illustrate corporate ineptitude. Jazz was designed to run only on Apple’s Macintosh 512K and was an integrated suite which included a word processor, spreadsheet, database, graphics, and communication software. It was a corporate companion of Lotus Symphony which was a suite which ran on IBM compatible PCs under PC-MS-DOS but not too much should be read into the musical nomenclature; both were integrated suites which ran under different operating systems on different hardware. Lotus 1-2-3 wasn’t the first spreadsheet but it was the one which became the so-called “killer app” which legitimized the IBM PC for business use and, noting the small-scale successes being enjoyed by some of the early suites, Symphony was concocted as something which would rely on the reputation of 1-2-3 for its success. Although never a big seller on the scale of 1-2-3, Symphony in the 1980s found a niche.
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