46: Jazz from the Beginning, Garvin Bushell (as told to Mark Tucker)

Brilliant stuff. Excellently written, and every big name you're looking for comes up. There are many interesting anecdotes, and some interesting (folk)etymologies I had not heard before.

About the term jazz, at some unspecified early time:

We didn't call the music jazz when I was growing up, except for the final tag of a number. After the cadence was closed there'd be a one-bar break, and the second bar was the tag—5-6-5-1 (sol-la-sol-do)—that was called the jazz.

And more, this time around 1916:

I'm quite sure [the word jazz] originated in Louisiana. The perfume industry was very big in New Orleans in those days, since the French had brought it over with them. They used jasmine—oil of jasmine—in all different odors to pep it up. It gave more force to the scent. So they would say, "let's jass it up a bit," when something was a little dead. When you started improvising, then, they said "jazz it up," meaning give it your own concept of the melody, give it more force, or presence. So if you improvised on the original melody of the composer, they said you were jazzing it up. It caught on in the red light district, when a woman would approach a man and say, "Is jazz on your mind tonight, young fellow?"

About "gutbucket":

The term "gutbucket" came from the chitterlings bucket. Chitterlings are the guts of a hog, and the practice used to be to take a bucket to the slaughterhouse and get a bucket of guts. Therefore, anything real low down was called gutbucket.

About Charleston dancing, around 1921:

I first saw the Charleston done at Leroy's. Russell Brown came from Charleston, and he did a Geechie dance they did on the Georgia South Sea Islands. It was called a "cut out" dance. People began to say to Brown, "Hey, Charleston, do your dance!" That's how the Charleston came to be introduced to New York.

Bushell's version of the Bechet dog anecdote that Wynton Marsalis tells with so much relish in "Jazz":

Sidney [Bechet] had an undersized Doberman he thought was part bulldog. And I had Caesar, a huge harlequin Great Dane I'd bought in Königsberg.
So one night, about four o'clock in the morning, Sidney and his dog came around to my room in Darmstadterhof, on the Friedrichstrasse. He knocked, and said in his deep bass voice, "Hey, namesake." (That's what he always called me, since our last names were so close.)
"Sidney, what do you want? It's four o'clock in the morning."
"Just open the door, I want to tell you something."
I opened the door, and he had this squatty dog with him.
"I brought my dog 'round here," Sidney said, "and I really want to let you know just how much dog you don't have, and how much dog I've got. So come on out in the hall and let 'em fight."
By now Caesar's clawing in the back, trying to get me out of the way to get to this Doberman. I said, "Would you take your dog and get away from here?"
"No, we gonna fight 'em out here this morning in the hall."
By this time people are getting up and knocking on the doors. I heard someone say, "Rufen sie die Polizei!" I closed the door on Sidney's face. Don't you know they got Sidney and locked him up that morning, not for drunkenness, but for disturbing the peace. But when they found out it was Bechet, the great musician, they let him out.

Bushell played with some modern folks, too. He particularly liked Dolphy, but he also played with Coltrane and Miles.

The final line in this commentary on Coltrane's habit to get "into a lot of monotonous scales going up and down" in his solos reminds me of Snoop Dogg's "These are two separate things" line that I've mentioned here before:

In a way, it was a technical exercise, like gymnastics: he was reviewing the things he practiced every day. But it's like a guy standing on one finger, and you say, "That's fantastic." Then you find out he has a steel pin down in his hand. That's not so fantastic.

Fantastic read. Very glad I picked this up.