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Flip Your Lid Over This Swingin’ Sampling of Slang From America’s Greatest Jazzmen

Jazz Slang Dictionary: Code words for women, music, sex and more during the Jazz Era.

The secret language allowed performers to talk about their audience without it overhearing, the way immigrant parents used Yiddish, Polish, or Italian to keep things from their English-speaking children. Vipers: people like Louis who smoked gage, tea, mota, muggles, weed, reefer, or what he called simply some of that good shit; His latest book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America, looks at how these three maestros wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights revolution.

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