I Got a New Curve This Year

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Some Thoughts on Improvisation and Mastery

"The arts are not drugs, they are not guaranteed to act when taken"

The will and need to improvise, strengthened by the will and need to survive in a hostile environment, is perhaps the number one asset to black Americans as we master any craft. In sports, as in dance, as in film, as in music, as even in the most mundane act or gesture, our output is and refuses to be (still), jazz.

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The earliest known references to jazz are in the sports pages of various West Coast newspapers covering baseball's Negro League. The first is found in the Los Angeles Times on April 2, 1912, referring to Portland Beavers pitcher Ben Henderson:


BEN'S JAZZ CURVE. "I got a new curve this year," softly murmured Henderson yesterday, "and I'm goin' to pitch one or two of them tomorrow. I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it." As prize fighters who invent new punches are always the first to get their's.

Henderson's jazz ball apparently was not a success, as there are no known further references to it except for a brief mention in the Times the following day...

Everybody has come back to the old town full of the old "jazz" and they promise to knock the fans off their feet with their playing. What is the "jazz"? Why, it's a little of that "old life," the "gin-i-ker," the "pep," otherwise known as the enthusiasm. A grain of "jazz" and you feel like going out and eating your way through Twin Peaks. It's that spirit which makes ordinary ball players step around like Satchel and Robinson.

Freedom becomes a discipline

"JAZZ" ( and WE CHANGE the spelling each time so as not to offend either faction) can be defined, but it cannot be synonymized, not imitated. If there were another word that exactly expressed the meaning of "jaz," "jazz" would never have been born. A new word, like a new muscle, only comes into being when it has long been needed. This remarkable and satisfactory-sounding word, however, means something like life, vigor, energy, effervescence of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility ebullience, courage, happiness--oh, what's the use?--

Don't ask its meaning, ask its use