Entry · catalog no. 1208
orchestration
/ /ˌɔːrkɪsˈtreɪʃən/ /or-kuh-STRAY-shuhn
noun · Harlem and the Black swing-band circuit · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
An overcoat: the heavy winter coat, the serious one. Like its lighter partner lead sheet, the word comes off the bandstand. The full orchestration is the thick bound set of parts for the whole band, bulky in a way a single melody page never is, so the heaviest thing a man could put on his back took the name of the heaviest thing on the music stand. Speakers often said full orchestration rather than the bare noun, which kept the contrast with the thin lead sheet audible in the phrase itself.
“Come January I got to get my orchestration out of hock or I am done for.”
2.
In its ordinary musical sense, the written-out arrangement of a piece for a full ensemble, with a part for every instrument. This is the literal sense the slang plays off, and it remains standard vocabulary in music.
“The band could not read the orchestration cold, so they head-arranged the last chorus.”
Origin & Attribution
The coat sense belongs to Black musicians and the Harlem jive world of the swing years, and it works as one half of a matched pair with lead sheet — neither joke lands without the other. Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary carries it, and Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe set out the reasoning in Really the Blues in 1946, contrasting the thin single sheet with the thick full orchestration and putting the phrase in the mouth of a speaker rather than only in a word list. Popular write-ups routinely present the word as something Calloway made up for his dictionary; his own 1944 foreword says otherwise, crediting many contributors and naming Billy Rowe's Pittsburgh Courier column as a place where much of this vocabulary first reached print.
1944
Entered in the sixth edition of Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary as an overcoat
1946
Mezzrow and Wolfe use full orchestration for a heavy coat and explain the bandstand logic
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem and the Black swing-band circuit · 1940s
Spoken by
Black musicians and the Harlem hep-cat set
$ORCHESThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical82 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
26/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1944
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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By region — how it actually sounds
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The Bronx, NY
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Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Cab Calloway, The New Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive, sixth edition, New York, 1944, entry Orchestration; reprinted in Cab Calloway and Bryant Rollins, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me, Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1976
book · printed
■
Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues, Random House, New York, 1946, p. 217 and appended jive glossary
book · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceJonathon Green, Green's Dictionary of Slang, digital edition, entry lead sheet, n., which quotes Mezzrow and Wolfe on the lead sheet and full orchestration contrast
reference · online
See also