WHEN "JAZZ" WAS A DIRTY WORD

The term made its debut exactly a century ago, but even jazz musicians long avoided using it

Duke Ellington

By TERRY TEACHOUT

Fire up the time machine, set the controls for New Orleans in 1907 and make your way to a rickety night spot on Perdido Street that is known to the locals as Funky Butt Hall. Look closely and you might see a child in short pants peering through a crack in the wall and listening to the band inside. The child is Louis Armstrong, and the band, a combo led by a cornet player named Buddy Bolden, is playing a brand-new style of music that sounds like a cross between ragtime and the blues. (click below to read more)



Don't call it "jazz," though, because nobody in Funky Butt Hall will know what you're talking about. They call it "ragtime." And don't try to tell them that it will someday be played in concert halls, because if you do, they'll laugh you off the dance floor. Bolden's band played background music for bumping, grinding, drinking and fighting. Nobody in New Orleans thought of it as art, and nobody would think of it that way for years to come. Well into the '60s, there were still plenty of skeptics who continued to question the musical worth of jazz, and one of the reasons for their persistent skepticism was the fact that it had been born in honky tonks with names like Funky Butt Hall.

The word "jazz" didn't appear in print with any frequency until March 1913, exactly a century ago. What's more, it doesn't seem to have had anything to do with music, nor was the word coined in New Orleans. It was used by baseball players and sportswriters in California as a synonym for "enthusiasm." By 1915 it was also being used to refer to improvised dance music. Two years after that, a five-piece ragtime combo from New Orleans cut a record whose label identified it as the "Original Dixieland 'Jass' Band." From then on the word (whose spelling soon became regularized) was permanently attached to the music.

For many years afterward, it was widely assumed, apparently incorrectly, that the word "jazz" derived from a similar-sounding slang word that initially meant "energy" but started to be used around the turn of the century as a vulgar term for seminal fluid. Because Storyville, New Orleans's notorious red-light district, was one of the very first places where jazz was played, both the word and the music itself came to be widely seen as socially disreputable, a sentiment that persisted for decades. And while many whites saw jazz as a black music and held it in contempt for that reason alone, the belief that it was a lower-class music was equally common among status-conscious middle-class blacks.

Nor has that belief entirely died out. To this day, Duke Ellington, one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, is the only jazz musician ever to have received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal, which recognizes "the highest or noblest achievement by an American Negro during the preceding year or years." The decision to single out a jazzman for such high honors in 1959 was a source of intense controversy. The Los Angeles Tribune, a prominent black newspaper of the day, editorialized as follows: "Lord knows, we love [Ellington's] music, but its sexy growls and moans have never moved us to go out and register to vote, or bowl over a bastion of prejudice."

This helps to explain why Ellington, who came from a middle-class family, refused to call his music jazz. "I don't write jazz," he said. "I write Negro folk music." In 1965, the year in which Ellington was passed over for a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize, he complained to Nat Hentoff that most Americans "still take it for granted that European music—classical music, if you will—is the only really respectable kind…jazz [is] like the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with." Charles Mingus, another great black jazzman, felt much the same way: "To me the word 'jazz' means nigger, discrimination, second-class citizenship, the whole back-of-the-bus bit."

But the power and beauty of jazz finally won over its detractors, and today it is regarded throughout the world as a form of high art that is directly comparable in seriousness and significance to classical music. Not only is jazz played in concert halls and taught in the public schools, but it's increasingly used in films, TV shows and ads as a cultural signifier, an infallible indicator of upper-middle-class hipness.

Will etymologists and musicologists look back on the later controversy over rock 'n' roll—whose name, unlike the word "jazz," originally had unambiguous sexual connotations—with similar bemusement? That's anyone's guess. But Louis Armstrong would likely have approved of jazz's latter-day status as an art music. "I mean, you don't just go around waking people up to the effect of saying, 'You know, this music is art,' " he said in 1965. "But it's got to be art because the world has recognized our music from New Orleans, else it would have been dead today." So it has, and so it is.

—Mr. Teachout is the author of "Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington," out this fall from Gotham Books.