Ian in Jacksonville, Florida, wonders about why musicians use the word clam to mean “a mistake” or “an egregious musical error,” as in There are a lot of clams in there or We need to practice where the clams are regarding a musical passage that needs work. Occasionally, it’s used as a verb, as in You clammed. In the 1950s, the term clambake meant a jam with bad vibes. In the 1930s, a clambake was actually a good jam session, but the term went from a positive sense to a negative one, a process that linguists refer to pejoration. It’s possible the term became skunked, which describes a term so widely used by the public that the cool people came to disdain it. Robert S. Gold’s A Jazz Lexicon (Amazon) is a helpful resource for the language of jazz. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Clam” for a Musical Mistake May Come from Jazz “Clambake” Slang”
Hey there, you have a boy with words.
Hi, this is Ian Charlton calling from Jacksonville, Florida.
Hey, Ian, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?
Well, I’m in the Navy band here in Jacksonville, Florida, and musicians have got a lot of slang that we use. And one of those that I’ve been using for years has been a clam. We apply that to, you know, a wrong note, a chip note, any kind of error in performance. And I’ve noticed myself using it the other day in conversation and wondered, why a clam? Why do we call it a clam? Why isn’t it something else? And because I listened to your show, I thought you folks would probably have an answer for me. So a horn player plays a wrong note and the leader stops and says, you clammed? It can be either a noun or a verb, usually more as a noun. The leader might say there are a lot of clams in there. We need to practice where the clams are. But occasionally you will use it as a verb, like you clam, but that seems to be a little less frequent.
Okay. We do know something about this, and I think we can help you get to the bottom of it. Oh, I’d love it. There are a couple jazz dictionaries, and one by Robert Golden is the one that is the most authoritative. And so this is the one that I’m going to use as my primary source, but there are other people who have talked about this over the last hundred years. And let’s take this history in reverse order because I think it has more to say. So right now we’re talking about clam, meaning a particularly egregious musical era, right?
Yes. So it’s something that kind of stands out to everybody and right this meaning has been around since at least the mid 1950s so that’s okay pretty interesting during that same period there was the jazz slang clam bake it was a jam session with unfortunately bad vibes or no groove and just nothing working between the musicians lots of clams, in other words, like a clam bake. And outside of jazz, at the same time in everyday slang, a clam bake was a party or other event that wasn’t all it was supposed to be. Basically a fun time that fizzled.
So clam bake was basically a bad time in slang, both in jazz and outside of jazz.
Okay. That clam bake, that negative clam bake, had as far back as the 1930s, it was a good thing. In jazz. So somewhere along the way it transformed. So a Clambake was a good jam session. And we know this because there’s lots of records of it. For example, Tommy Dorsey had his Clambake 7. This was a smaller band within a band from his larger group. And it wasn’t named that because it it was a bad group. It was because it was very good.
So somewhere along the way, something called pejoration happened. This is like the word pejorative, where we went from something positive to something negative. And that positive that we went from was a real clam bake. These are outdoor gatherings or seafood, and other things are baked or steamed, which are nice parties to have. And so we went from the literal, actual clam bake, something positive to a figurative clam, something negative over a span of a couple decades.
So why did that happen? What was the impetus behind the language changing? It’s because people love to mess with words. They love to play with language. That’s literally it. What’s really interesting to me, too, is that it’s extended beyond music. I used to do a lot of rowing and sculling, and we would always talk about catching a clam. You know, you’re in a four or an eight-person boat and somebody messes up and the oar doesn’t go completely in the water the right way, and you’re said to catch a clam.
So that means you’re out of rhythm, just like a jazz musician might be out of rhythm. Fascinating. Interesting.
Yeah, I hadn’t heard that one. That’s pretty cool. So there’s some weird thing that happened where Clambake went from a positive jam session to a negative jam session, and that’s the one that interests me the most. There’s like this 20-year period where that transition happened. And it’s possible that the slang became skunked, as linguists sometimes say, where a term becomes so overused that the cool people stop using it and only the squares use it. And then so the cool people kind of just use it as a pejorative term for the square people who are still using it.
Interesting. Thank you. That clears up a lot and gives me some places to look and read a little more.
So, Ian, we’d love to hear some more musical slang sometime. I’m sure you have a lot of it. And some of it I’m not even sure is slang anymore. It’s just I use it enough, but that is just part of the language. But that was one I just got to thinking. It’s like, why a clam? Does it have to do with the food, that it’s a mollusk? But I had no idea that it was descended from the party, a clam bake.
That’s cool. Thank you.
Thanks so much for calling. Appreciate it. Take care. Appreciate you. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye. Bye.
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