Sometimes it’s tempting to take slang-soaked speech for a foreign language, particularly when it’s delivered with speed in a strange accent. “You dig, ole man, that from early bright to late black, the cats and the chippies are laying down some fine, heavy jive; most of it like the tree, all rot; like the letter, all wrote; like the country road, all rut; like the apple all rot; like the cheese all rat!” ran an introductory sentence to Dan Burley’s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, published in 1944.With its adumbrations of rap, this weaving of black vocabulary into the jazz world of the hipster white man was exploited for its comic and surreal potential in the 1950s by Lord Buckley (1906-60), whose monologue “The Nazz”, on the life of Jesus, is r