TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, I am Mark Rapp, and this is Rapp on Jazz.
Jazz is an odd word. Not surprisingly, no one agrees on how it came to be.
Was it from Bert Kelly, who formed Bert Kelly's Jazz Band in 1914? Or Trombonist Tom Brown led a New Orleans band in Chicago in 1915 and claimed his group was the first billed as a "jass" band?
Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns in Jazz: A History of America's Music (2000) suggest that "jazz" comes from the jasmine perfume that prostitutes wore in the red-light district of New Orleans.
Whatever the obscure origin, the word Jazz has blossomed into full flower and been recognized as the Word of the Century by the American Dialect Society.
This has been Rapp On Jazz, a co-production of ColaJazz and SC Public Radio, made possible in part by Layman Poupard Publishers, producers of the Literary Criticism Series and the Dictionary of Literary Biography.