Entry · catalog no. 1263
jazz
/ /dʒæz/ /JAZ
n. · New Orleans, Louisiana · 1910s
✓ Verified
1.
The improvised, blues-rooted, syncopated ensemble music developed by Black musicians in New Orleans from the 1890s onward, and every tradition descended from it. The word itself first meant something else entirely — liveliness, pep, fighting spirit — and was fastened to the music afterward.
“They had been playing it for twenty years before anybody called it jazz.”
Origin & Attribution
Two origins, and they are not the same origin. The music is Black New Orleans: Black and Creole musicians working the city's dance halls, funeral processions and street parades from the 1890s. The word arrived separately and later, and its earliest print instances are white sportswriters on the West Coast — the Los Angeles Times of April 2, 1912, on a pitcher's jazz ball that wobbles, then E. T. Scoop Gleeson in the San Francisco Bulletin of March 6, 1913, glossing it as that old life, the pep. It attaches to music in Chicago around 1915 and reaches print in New Orleans only in 1916. The musicians said plainly that the name was not theirs: Sidney Bechet, born in New Orleans in 1897, wrote that jazz is a name the white people have given to the music, and Duke Ellington and Max Roach said much the same. Gerald Cohen's study Origin of the Term Jazz treats the 1912 instances as isolated and locates the word's real emergence in the 1913 San Francisco sports pages.
1912
First known print use, Los Angeles Times, of a pitcher's jazz ball
1915
Attached to the music in Chicago
1917
Original Dixieland Jass Band records; Victor advertises the spelling as unsettled
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
New Orleans, Louisiana · 1910s
Spoken by
Black New Orleans musicians; players and listeners worldwide
$JAZZThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady5 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
95/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1912
in the culture
Mainstream crossover
1917
search interest spikes
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Los Angeles Times, "Ben's Jazz Curve," April 2, 1912
1912
■
E. T. "Scoop" Gleeson, San Francisco Bulletin, March 6, 1913
1913
■
Gerald Leonard Cohen, Origin of the Term "Jazz"
2015
■
+ Cite a sourceSidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle
1960
See also