Ivey-Divey

[stevebop]

Dig! Can you help?

I know that "Ivey-Divey" is a "Prez-ism" Something that Lester Young coined in his unique way of speaking.

What exactly does Ivey-Divey mean? I know you know

It is also the title of Don Byron's new release.

Smotherin' Heights!

Always Know,
Steve Schwartz
Jazz from Studio Four
Friday, 7p-midnight
WGBH, 89.7FM, Boston
www.wgbh.org/jazz

[Pete C]

The only thing I could find online, besides Byron references, was a line from a story copyrighted 1996:

"Joey, Joey. Are you ivey-divey, little brother?" (Ivey-divey was Lester Young jazz talk for "good").

http://www.the-manhattanite.com/lush.htm

I was wondering if it has anything to do with "Mairzy Doats." That song was written in 1942.

[Sergio Zamora]

I had no idea it was a prez-ism, but just saying it out loud made me think it meant 'it's all good', copasthetic', 'everything is everything' or something like that.

[Dennis Gonzalez]

Ça va? Ça boume?

[Dr Dave]

paging Don Byron...

[Gentle Giant]

Probably this CD, when I get it, will end my streak of listening to nothing but SMiLE.

I have the current Jazz Times interview/article with him on my desk. I'll try to read it tonight and post any useful information.

[Cem]

Originally Posted by Sergio Zamora

I had no idea it was a prez-ism, but just saying it out loud made me think it meant 'it's all good', copasthetic', 'everything is everything' or something like that.

Yes, it does sound or feel like 'copasetic' or 'hunky-dory'...

[Sergio Zamora]

Originally Posted by Cem

Yes, it does sound or feel like 'copasetic' or 'hunky-dory'...

Oops. Turns out the word is copacetic. I don't know where I came up with copasthetic. It's a slang word anyway, so no biggie.

[CYMBALHOLIC]

I believe linked off of Don's page or at least, I know if you go to Jason Moran's website and scrub around on the main page there, you'll see a direct link to a short documentary film about Ivey-Divey...
Mostly studio shots and Don talking about his conception of the recording, as well as the meaning of the term, "Ivey-Divey"

---

sorry, went and got the link...watch it by clicking here!

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by Sergio Zamora

Oops. Turns out the word is copacetic. I don't know where I came up with copasthetic. It's a slang word anyway, so no biggie.

You must be synaesthetic.

[SinginSumo]

For that matter, does any reader here own the Complete Lester Young on Verve? If so, please PM me.

[JazzJunkie]

Originally Posted by Cem

Yes, it does sound or feel like 'copasetic' or 'hunky-dory'...

Oh great, now I'm all caught up in discovering the etymology of the phrase "hunky-dory"...

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by JazzJunkie

Oh great, now I'm all caught up in discovering the etymology of the phrase "hunky-dory"...

Hunky-Dory
Popular legend has it that it derives from the name of a street in Edo (Tokyo), Japan where there were bazaars and other entertainments for sailors. The term appears in American slang in 1866, shortly after Commodore Perry's trip to Japan. This legend was plugged by Bartlett's in 1877, but other than the date there is little evidence to support it.

Hunky meaning fine or splendid dates to 1861. The adjective hunk meaning safe or secure is even older, dating to the early 1840s. Given these earlier usages predate Perry's opening of Japan, it is unlikely the word derives from a Japanese source. In short, it's another one of those that we must mark "origin unknown."

http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorh.htm

hunky-dory

SYLLABICATION: hun·ky-do·ry
PRONUNCIATION: hngk-dôr, -dr
ADJECTIVE: Slang Perfectly satisfactory; fine.
ETYMOLOGY: Probably alteration of hunky, safe, all right, from obsolete hunk, goal, home in a game, from Dutch honk, from Frisian hunk.

http://www.bartleby.com/61/72/H0327200.html

hunky-dory
1866, Amer.Eng. (popularized c.1870 by a Christy Minstrel song), perhaps a reduplication of hunkey "all right, satisfactory" (1861), from hunk "in a safe position" (1847) New York City slang, from Du. honk "goal, home," from M.Du. honc "place of refuge, hiding place." A theory from 1876, however, traces it to Honcho dori, said to be a street in Yokohama, Japan, where sailors went for diversions of the sort sailors enjoy.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=h&p=13

[JazzJunkie]

Can always count on Pete to come through in a etymological pinch! Christy Minstrels -- I think I actually have a record somewhere of the "New Christy Minstrels" -- wonder if they do a version of HD? or maybe even Ivey-Divey? That would just be too weird...

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by JazzJunkie

Can always count on Pete to come through in a etymological pinch! Christy Minstrels -- I think I actually have a record somewhere of the "New Christy Minstrels" -- wonder if they do a version of HD? or maybe even Ivey-Divey? That would just be too weird...

Christy's Minstrels were a popular American blackface musical group of the mid-nineteenth century. The New Christy Minstrels named themselves after this bit of Americana, but thankfully did not don burnt cork.

[Gentle Giant]

From "Don Leaps In," by Nate Chien, Jazz Times, October 2004:


Among the many terms coined by Lester Young, "ivey-divey" was among his personal favorites. Although its definition was mutable, the phrase usually implied reconciliation with one's circumstances - an attitute Albert Murray has strongly identified with the blues. "The blues," Murray writes, "is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal ecperience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." It's hardly a stretch to apply the definition to a post-Army Young, and to The Lester Young Trio. Byron's appropriation of the term decades later capitalizes on its ambiguity. Jason Moran suggests as much when he alludes to a conversation between Young and French journalist Francois Postif recorded in 1959, mere weeks before the saxophonist's demise. "If you heard Lester Young say 'ivey-divey' in an interview," says the pianist, "you would understand the entire attitude of this record."


A separate review in the issue of the Byron CD, by Thomas Conrad, calls it "outrageous and sublime." Conrad closes oddly with, "With Ivey-Divey, Don Byron has finally made a major album." As if Tuskegee Experiments is a minor work?