Jazz music, it turns out, is just about as hard to define as it is to determine precisely when the word “jazz” itself entered the English language.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, one needs to look to the American version of the English language to find the roots of this strange word, and to the Yanks again for insight into the fluid and florid history of jazz music itself.

The word jazz seems to have entered the lexicon during the second decade of the twentieth century.

Sources indicate that it happened in the likeliest of places...San Francisco, California. 'The Bulletin on April 5, 1913, published an article by Ernest J. Hopkins entitled “In Praise of 'Jazz,' a Futurist Word Which Has Just Joined the Language.” The article, which used the spellings jaz and jazz interchangeably, discussed the term at length and included a highly positive definition:  “JAZZ”... can be defined, but it cannot be synonymized. If there were another word that exactly expressed the meaning of “jaz,” “jazz” would never have been born. A new word, like a new muscle, only comes into being when it has long been needed. This remarkable and satisfactory-sounding word, however, means something like life, vigour, energy, effervescence of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility ebulliency, courage, happiness--oh, what's the use?--JAZZ.'  By 1915, the word was being used by journalists in Chicago to describe (blues) music, and three years later it surfaced in what is widely regarded as the spiritual home of jazz music, New Orleans.