Dude...there are about as many stories of where the word jazz comes from as there are Black guys in prison :D And none of them can really be proven and the word likely has several different antecedents. Right down to people claiming the word Jass comes from the French word Jaser, which means um...something like..to talk or chatter energetically, to talk alot or to talk fast or something of that nature if I remember correctly.  [quote]    Stumble on this article. IMO it closes the case on the origin the word JAZZ.  Why Do We Say That? “JAZZ”  [B“If the truth were known about the origin of ‘jazz,’ it would never be mentioned in polite society,” wrote Clay Smith in Etude magazine in September 1924. A trombonist who had toured Western mining towns in the 1890s, playing in honky-tonks where “the vulgar word Jazz was in general currency,” Mr. Smith knew what he was writing about. The word was African-American slang for copulation, If it was African-American slang then what were all of the cowboys doing using it out in the Wild West in mining towns and honky tonks? They weren't lettin' any negroes in a Western honky tonk, that's for sure.... Weren't many negroes out West at all actually. It may have been a slang term for sex, maybe, but I doubt it was an exclusively African American slang term or all of those cowboys out there in the old West wouldn't have been saying it, doesn't make sense. I think it was just regular slang...you know, started by White people. Did the guy they quoted say it was specifically african american slang or was that the article's writer assuming, speculating or just lying... I didn't see anywhere in that Clay Smith's quote where he said it was specifically Black slang...he just said the vulgar word jazz was in general currency.   In other news...I've always heard people claim that the word Jazz may have a connection with the words jism and jizz:rofl But is it true? Um...I highly doubt it.    Would you like some other stories on the origins of the word jass? There sure are a lot of crackpot theories out there.     Writers, crackpots, and scholars have proposed a mind-boggling variety of etymologies for the word Jazz: the name of a dancing slave named Jasper the moniker of the mythical musician Jasbo Brown; the French word chasse for the gliding dance step that gave us the American word sashay; the Creole French jaser, meaning useless talk; a New Orleans perfume called jasmine; and the Arabic jazib, meaning one who allures. (6)     John Philip Sousa, the American march composer and band leader believed the word Jazz came into American speech through Jazzbo, 1890's Vaudeville slang for the rousing rollick of the finale, when performers would come back out on stage to gad about and cavort for the audience. (7)      The  words Jass or Jazz were not used by any of the foundational African-American New Orleans musicians  --  from Buddy Bolden and Bunk Johnson to Joe King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong -- prior to the release of the first Jass record in history: Dixieland Jass One Step and Livery Stable Blues by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, in New York City, in March 1917. (14)    Louis Armstrong wrote in 1944: I moved back home with my mother (in 1918). I was working at Tom Anderson's Cabaret * located on 'Rampart...Lots of Big Shots from Lulu White's used to come there...And I was playing the Cornet. We played all sorts of arrangements T'wasn't called 'Jazz' back there in those days They played a whole lot of Ragtime music. We called it Dixie * Jazz, in the later years. (15)       Sidney Bechet wrote: But let me tell you one thing: Jazz, that's a name the white people have given to the music .  There's two kinds of music. There's classic and there's ragtime. When I tell you ragtime, you can feel it, there's a spirit right in the word...But Jazz * Jazz could mean any damn' thing: high times, screwing, ballroom. It used to be spelled Jass... (17)       Jazz in its various forms—jass, jasz, and jaz are among the early spellings—may derive from some African language, though no connections have ever been proved.   Of course not. Just like it's never been firmly proven that Blacks invented Jazz or Blues all by their lonesome little self, but people sure like to pretend like it's an undeniable fact even when there's no solid, undeniable evidence... And if you question the official story and attempt to look into it...well, you're just a dirty racist. Kind of like when you question the official story of the Holocaust you become an anti-Semite. What are they trying to hide I wonder...the truth? :D     The term has secondary senses of excitement, energy, and invigoration, often in such constructions as jazz up, to enliven; jazz around, to fool around; and jazzy, lively or snappy.    Yeah yeah yeah...blah blah blah and all that jazz...      The asociation of the word with the music is hardly surprising,     Uh oh, Unregistere. Looks like you have a typo, you forgot the other S on association;)    considering that jazz flourished initially in the steamy atmosphere of New Orleans brothels.   All over in New Orleans not just in whorehouses for cripes sake. But that's where yo boy, the mulatto Jelly Roll Moron got his start. Playing in whorehouses because that's the only place that would hire him:p Guess how he got the name Jelly Roll?:D     .” (The shrieking women would have been called jazz babies, a term that also dates from this era.)     There was a famous New Orleans Dixieland group called the Jazzbabies. They were all White.....   The transfer of the sexual term to music may have been made via the word’s secondary meanings. Lafcadio Hearn, who spent time in New Orleans in the late 1870s and early 1880s, studying local life and customs (and who was fired for not filing stories on Louisiana politics as expected by the Cincinnati newspaper that had sent him there), reported in 1917 that “the word ‘jaz,’ meaning to speed things up, to make excitement, [had been] common among the blacks of the South and had been adopted by the Creoles as a term to be applied to music of a rudimentary syncopated type.”   Yeah yeah. Some old-fashioned, conservative types at the time were horrified by Jazz and didn't want kids listening to it and would make up stories like that as an attempt to slander it to keep people(White people) from listening to it. Myths and stories like Jazz was a sex term and things like that. There were certain people who made up stories about the word Jazz being African in origin for publicity or for a joke which some people took seriously, like this...     Allow me to clear some things up about the supposed statement from Lafcadio Hearn...he never actually wrote that, ever...it was a hoax....check it out..     [I] There is no evidence of the words Jass or Jazz in any African-American slave narratives, oral histories, folk songs, or recorded vernacular speech, prior to 1913. The late Alan P. Merriam, Professor of Anthropology, wrote in 1974: I have never found the word in Africa. (8)     Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large for the Oxford American English Dictionary, wrote in Slate magazine, in December, 2004: The African etymology of jazz was fabricated by a New York press agent in 1917. (9)      The press agent was the glib master of baloney and hoopla, Walter Kingsley, whose tongue-in-cheek article on the new word Jass: Whence Comes Jass? was published in August 1917 in the NY Sun. Kingsley's phoney African etymology of Jazz was first exposed as a scam by the writer and researcher Dick Holbrooke, who reprinted it in full in Storyville jazz magazine in January, 1974. (10)     Variously spelled Jas, Jass, Jaz, Jazz, Jasz, and Jascz. The word is African in origin. It is common on the Gold Coast of Africa and in the hinterland of Cape Castle. In his studies of the creole patois and idiom of New Orleans Lafcadio Hearn reported the word 'jaz,' meaning to speed things up was common among blacks of the South and had been applied by the creoles (sic) as a term to be applied to music of the syncopated type. No doubt the witch doctors and medicine men of the Congo used the same term at those jungle parties when the tom-toms throbbed and their sturdy warriors gave their pep an extra kick. My own personal idea of jazz and it's origin is told in this stanza by Vachel Lindsay:' Fat black bucks in a wine barrel room with a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom. Boomlay, Boomlay, Boomlay BOOM.' Lindsay is then transported to the Congo and it's feats and revels and he hears, as I have heard, a 'thigh bone beating on a tin pan gong.' Mumbo Jumbo is the god of jazz. Be careful how you write of jazz else he will hoodoo you. (11):rofl:rofl(the guy's original article on the African roots of the word jazz, as a joke, but many people took it seriously.)    Kingsley's faux-linguistic treatment of the word Jass has since been quoted in the academic echo chambers by scholars, historians, lexicographers, and etymologists galore. His facile, literate mullarkey on the word Jass was nothing more than a cute publicity gimmick to boost his Big Shot client Florenz Ziegfeld's summer musical spectacular Midnight Frolic, which featured the new hot music called Jass on the roof of the swank New Amsterdam hotel in midtown Manhattan. The NY Sun's editors got the joke and Flo Ziegfeld's advertising money, humorously entitling Kingsley's piece: Whence Comes Jazz? -- Facts from the Great Authority on the Subject. (12)    Kingsley's putative source, the writer  Lafcadio Hearn, never used the word Jazz or Jass or Jaz in any of his books, articles, or letters, a fact confirmed by Richard Holbrooke and Hearn's biographers.  But, the Hearn bunkum, and Kingsley's outrageously racist NY Sun article continues to be cited by American and English dictionaries. (13)       Herbert Asbury, best remembered today for his book The Gangs of New York (1927), reported in another work, The French Quarter (1936), that the first true jazz group was formed in New Orleans about 1895. Composed of seven boys aged 12 to 15, it called itself the Spasm Band and on occasion was advertised as the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band. When sometime around 1900 another band adopted the same name for an engagement at the Haymarket dance hall, the original Spasms showed up with rocks in their pockets. Their appearance persuaded the owner of the hall to repaint his advertising placards to read “Razzy Dazzy Jazzy Band.” Asbury was sometimes too credulous, but he did talk to two surviving members of the Spasms. And if he got this story right, the Haymarket signs just might represent jazz’s earliest appearance in writing in a musical context. —Hugh Rawson    :D:D Hate to say I told ya so!! Good ol' Herbert Asbury, tellin' it like it is ;)        Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band. LOL! So those kids are the originators of Jazz. African American goosed up their music from those, are you folks for real?:D   African-American and American American(Whites;)) musicians both refined and elaborated upon the RAZZY DAZZY Spasm Band's unique and original style to create New Orleans Jazz as we now know it, aka Dixieland. Yes, this is truth and you cannot accept it, you are in denial.:D