Original Dixieland 'Jass' Band
"Dixieland Jass Band One-Step"
matrix# 19332-3, recorded 2/26/1917

Original Dixieland Jazz Band
"Palesteena"
matrix# 24590-5, recorded 12/4/1920

In brief, a consideration of an exciting word, and the enthusiasm that comes with trying to name something new:

"Everybody has come back to the old town full of the old "jazz" and they promise to knock the fans off their feet with their playing.

"What is the "jazz"? Why, it's a little of that "old life," the "gin-i-ker," the "pep," otherwise known as the enthusiasalum. A grain of "jazz" and you feel like going out and eating your way through Twin Peaks. It's that spirit which makes ordinary ball players step around like Lajoies and Cobbs."

-from a series of articles published 1913 by Chicago
baseball journalist E.T. "Scoop" Gleeson

It was four years later that a writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote:

"Why is the jass music, and therefore the jass band? . . . Indeed, one might . . . say that Jass music is the indecent story syncopated and counterpointed. . . . In the matter of jass, New Orleans is particularly interested, since it has been widely suggested that this . . . musical vice had its birth in . . . our slums."

But what was on the mind of these writers trying out such a word on such disparate ends? One need look no further than jazz' linguistic ancestry: "jasm," "jazm" or "jizm" were long in use througout the English-speaking Americas as a casual manner of reference to "spirit; energy; spunk."