"One way to catch the spirit of jazz music is to know its slang. The cryptic paragraph above may be translated as follows: two Negroes got on the bus with a bass viol; when asked if he knew Lawrence Brown, one of them said he did, and that Mr. Brown was a fine trombone player. Continuing in the language of jazz, it may be explained that Lawrence Brown is a hot trombonist with Duke Ellington's famous Negro jazz orchestra."
"That is to say, he excels in spontaneous, highly syncopated solos.* He is decidedly not a sweet trombonist-he doesn't play sentimentally with lots of vibrato. He could, but he just doesn't like that sort of thing. Nor is Mr. Brown cornfed. Cornfed or corny is the jazz musician's term for what is old-fashioned. For example, it is now extremely corny to use the once popular wah-wah mutes which make brass instruments sound like crying babies."
Jazz slang functions as a coded vocabulary that translates everyday speech into musical meaning. The anecdote identifies two Black men with a bass viol and names Lawrence Brown as a hot trombonist in Duke Ellington's orchestra. 'Hot' denotes spontaneous, highly syncopated solos, while 'sweet' implies sentimental vibrato and 'corny' means old-fashioned. Action verbs like get off, swing it, sock it, smear it, or go to town describe aggressive syncopation. Wah-wah mutes became labeled corny by changing taste. 'Licks' denotes musical phrases, and 'go to church' denotes a hot musician's version of solemnity.
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