Word: jazzed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Orleans youth was in the grip of something called Voutian, a way of life given to the world by a jazz musician named Slim Gaillard. Its practitioners called themselves Vouts (pronounced Vowts), prefixed names with the symbol "cat-o," said "scooto" for goodbye, and added "reeny" to almost every other word to give it class. When two male Vouts met they whirled their "jelly chains" (three-foot watch chains), bent, backwards from the knees, and reached up to shake hands at eye level. New Orleans girls were wearing bells on their shoes and carrying ''slam books"-notebooks...
Sidney Bechet, who is 49 but looks older, has delivered the same two-beat jazz over half the U.S., in London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow. With his pals, including Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Zutty Singleton, he has played it on nearly 100 records. Experts have named him on their all-star bands. But he hasn't made a fortune...
Sidney didn't like the big sleek bands where the money was: the musicians were trying to outblow each other. In 1933 he gave up and opened a tailor shop. Then came the hot jazz "revival," and all of a sudden schoolkids who had never seen Sidney knew all about him, from hearing the old records. He shut up his tailor shop and started to play again-usually in small groups, including one of his own called the "New Orleans Feetwarmers." Unlike his friend "Satchelmouth" Armstrong, he refused to front for bigtime, second-rate bands...
...many other ways, the U.S. was settling down. If World War II was to be followed by something approximating the jazz age, it was not yet in sight. Nightclub business was off everywhere-from Manhattan's Stork to Hollywood's Mocambo. The great migrations and frenzied travel stirred up by war were almost at an end. There were fewer marriages and fewer divorces in the first months of 1947 than there had been...
...since 1941. Last spring he made a brilliant musical comeback in Rome, Milan, Paris. Last week he was found lying on a street corner just before dawn, his head cut and bruised. Two strangers in a nightclub had offered to drive him to another spot to hear some real jazz, said Dr. Klemperer, and on the way, they suddenly robbed him of $30, threw...