Context

This line was sung by Velma Kelly in the musical Chicago (1975), written by Fred Ebb.

Chicago transports the audience from a Broadway stage to the mean streets of Prohibition-Era Chicago where a woman could commit a double homicide and then nail a musical number. This woman is Velma Kelly, a vaudevillian who killed her husband and his lover, and gets led off to jail by the police after her big intro song.

The line "all that jazz" isn't just a mood setter. Between lyrics about fight, booze, and brawls, it reminds the audience how important jazz was in the Roaring Twenties. They called it the Jazz Age for a reason, and no musical genre has given its name to a decade since. Maybe the 2010s will be known as the EDM Age, who knows?

So, sit back, have some kind of liquid refreshment, and enjoy the most fabulous crime story ever put to music, beginning with "All that Jazz."

Where you've heard it

"All that jazz" has come a long way from Chicago , and just become an end of sentence filler phrase. At least it's classier than "um" or "uh."

Additional Notable References:

• The phrase "all that jazz" is all over pop culture and has been the title of episodes of TV shows as different as Golden Girls, Sealab 2021, and the 1960s cartoon Top Cat about a gang of alley cats in New York.
• There is a 1979 musical film called All That Jazz about a Broadway choreographer trying to work on his Broadway musical and a Hollywood film project at the same time. It's loosely based on the life of Chicago choreographer Bob Fosse, who also directed the film.
• Legendary singer Ella Fitzgerald's last studio album from 1989 was titled All That Jazz, which included the swing and jazz tunes which made her famous in the 1930s.
• Finally, Catherine Zeta-Jones nails "All that Jazz" in the 2002 Best-Picture-winning film adaptation of Chicago, and really pulls off that flapper look, too. Amazing, right? She won an Oscar for this performance.

Pretentious Factor

If you were to drop this quote at a dinner party, would you get an in-unison "awww" or would everyone roll their eyes and never invite you back? Here it is, on a scale of 1-10.

This is a common turn of phrase and not pretentious at all. There might be some cause for concern if you turn a spotlight on yourself and perform the whole song, though.