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Chapter 11: Mass Appeal: Taking Note of Jazz in Popular Culture
Calloway compiled much of the best jazz slang in his Hepsters Dictionary, published
in 1945. It’s now out of print and fetches as much as $350 on online
auctions. Originally, the idea of coded slang dates back to a time when slaves
used words with double meanings so masters and bosses couldn’t understand
them. After Calloway and others popularized jazz lingo, though, it began entering
mainstream American life through various art forms.
� Novelist Jack Kerouac was a huge fan of jazz whose characters in On the
Road spoke like jazz musicians.
� Screenwriters and directors also incorporated jazz language into biker
films like The Wild One (1953) and Easy Rider (1969).
� Most hippies who used words like cool and mellow and reefer probably
didn’t know that their lingo originated in Harlem during the 1930s and
1940s, was brought into the mainstream through books and literature,
and survived as a mainstream of hip culture through several decades.
In the ’60s, I took a drive with my parents through San Francisco’s Haight
Ashbury neighborhood to look at the hippies. Later, I learned that Jack
Kerouac and the Beat Generation had used words including “hip.” But it
was years later that I found out that the word’s origin was probably in the
Chicago jazz scene during Prohibition, when jazz fans carrying hip flasks
became known as “hipsters.”
Here are a few of Cab Calloway’s favorite words (which he undoubtedly collected
from the black Harlem culture all around him) and their meanings.
Many of the phrases have become a part of the mainstream:
� Apple: The big town, Harlem (By some accounts, Lester Young coined
the phrase “The Big Apple.”)
� Beat it out: Play it hot, emphasize the rhythm (This was decades before
Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” or the Go-Gos’ “We Got the Beat.”)
� Chick: Girl
� Corny: Old fashioned
� Hip: Wise, sophisticated
� Mellow: All right, fine
� Pops, Jack: Salutation for males
� Reefer: Marijuana
� Riff: Hot lick, musical phrase
� Rock me: Send me, kill me, move me with rhythm
� Solid: Great, swell, okay
� Threads: Suit, dress or costume
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