Entry · catalog no. 1134
take off
/ /ˌteɪk ˈɔf/ /TAYK AWF
verb · Harlem and the national jazz circuit · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
For a player to leave the written arrangement behind and start inventing — standing up out of the section at the change and carrying a chorus alone while the rest of the band holds the ground underneath. The image is aviation, brand new and glamorous in the 1930s: the soloist lifts off the runway the arrangement has been laying down. It described the moment of departure specifically, not the whole solo, which is why it sat alongside phrases like taking a chorus and riding. In the band world of the swing era it was the second-string term. The dominant expression for the same act was get off, and the two were used interchangeably by the same players; take off is the variant that survived into print because Calloway listed it.
“Chu would sit through the whole head arrangement and then take off on the second chorus.”
Origin & Attribution
The working speech of American jazz musicians, Black bands foremost, in the mid-1930s. This is verifiable independently of Calloway: H. Brook Webb's field study "The Slang of Jazz," published in American Speech in October 1937, records that a musician rising to play a solo chorus is said to get off or take off. Walter Winchell had the companion term get off in a syndicated column in November 1933. Calloway's dictionary printed take off and is usually given credit for it, but the term was in circulation among working musicians before his book, and Calloway's own foreword says he was documenting the language of the players around him rather than making it up.
1933
Winchell's column records the companion term "get off"
1937
Webb's "The Slang of Jazz" documents "get off" and "take off" as the soloist's terms
1944
Calloway's dictionary lists it
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem and the national jazz circuit · 1930s
Spoken by
Black swing and big-band musicians; adopted by the wider dance-band trade
$TAKEOFThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical89 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
35/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1937
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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Citations & Sources
■
H. Brook Webb, "The Slang of Jazz," American Speech 12, no. 3 (October 1937), pp. 179–184, at p. 181
journal · scholarly
■
Walter Winchell, "On Broadway," syndicated column, 11 November 1933
news · reported
■
+ Cite a sourceCab Calloway, The New Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive, 1944; reprinted in Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (New York, 1976)
book · printed
See also