a new linguistics
“The new underground required a new linguistics. To “broom” meant to travel by air. . . . Money was gold. Eyes meant willingness or enthusiasm. A pad was a bed, therefore someone’s room or apartment. . . . Out of the world became gone. . . . Blow your top became flip your wig, leading to flipped, flipped out, wigged, wig, and wiggy. Knocked out yielded gassed, as in an old-fashioned dentist’s chair. The verb gas gave the noun gas, a delighful experience. . . . Cool and dig served as verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and nouns. . . .
Pod, more commontly pot, first appeared to describe cannabis, standard drug since jazz began in New Orleans, heir to a lengthy list of names: hay, golden leaf, cool green, gage, muggles, [and] mezzirolls (after Chicago jazzman Milton Mezzrow). . . .”
—Ross Russell, from Bird Lives! The High Life & Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker, 1973.
the cats at Sunshine
“‘When Fate deals you one from the bottom of the deck, fall by the Sunshine Funeral Parlors. Your loved ones will be handled with dignity and care, and the cats at Sunshine will not lay too heavy a tab on you.’”
—Symphony Sid, “radio’s Mister Hip,” broadcasting from Birdland in the late 1940s; quoted by Ross Russell in Bird Lives! The High Life & Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker, 1973.
The word bebop
“The word bebop was thought to be onomatopoetic in origin, like klook-a-mop, and in fact may have been drived from the latter. Others said it had been invented by the jivey, irrepressible Fats Waller. Nobody liked it much, least of all the new jazzmen. But it stuck.”
—Ross Russell, a footnote from Bird Lives! The High Life & Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker, 1973.
klook-a-mop
“To lead the house band at Minton’s [Playhouse] Teddy Hill hired the very man he had fired less than a year before. Kenny “Klook” Clarke. . . . “Klook,” Clarke’s nickname, had arisen from the onomato-poetic klook-a-mop, a kind of double bomb, one of Clarke’s favorite percussion figures. . . . Now . . . Teddy Hill though about the bombs, the jagged zigzaggy rhythms that somehow worked, and . . . offered him the contract. . . .”
—Ross Russell, from Bird Lives! The High Life & Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker, 1973.