jaz

Dated spelling of jazz (“musical style”).

A diminutive of the male given name Jasper.

In January 2024, in a period of personal crisis, Gideon Haigh abruptly started writing the story of the night his seventeen-year-old brother Jasper was killed, finally facing how it had shaped the rest of his life. Seventy-two hours later he stopped. Dark, raw and revealing, My Brother Jaz is how it feels to lose someone, and yourself, even as the rest of the world turns, and you struggle to keep up.

A diminutive of the female given name Jasmine or any of its variant spellings.

A diminutive of the male given name James.

A diminutive of the female given name Janet or Janette.

I know, from picking up the post from the hall in the mornings, that Jaz has a mother in Northumbria who thinks her daughter's name is Janette. That jaunty z is but a wedge of lemon stuck into a bottle of beer.