Jazz Music and Its Choreographies of Listening

Through an interrogation of hybrid social dance/jazz concert events held in Atlanta in 1938, this chapter presents the book’s guiding questions and methods, which also stem from the author’s own experience as a social jazz dancer. Applying Susan Foster’s model of choreography as a broadly applicable analytic for the socially reinforced structuring of movement in space, it asks how and why jazz audiences’ default listening postures have moved from standing and dancing to relatively motionless sitting and listening. Exploring this question requires a critical, reflective look at the role of bodies in intellectual and aesthetic hierarchies and the complex webs of desire and anxiety that have shaped American institutional cultures’ conflicted relationships with music, with dance, and with all things corporeal. Critiquing the valorization of transcendence and universalism in American aesthetic discourses and in jazz music history specifically, this chapter advances an embodied approach to jazz history where dance becomes a point of entry into stories that de-center the pillars upon which jazz music’s canonic historical and ideological narratives rest. Following choreographer/folklorist Mura Dehn’s description of social jazz dancing, this book thus advances a perspective that operates “between the beats” of jazz history’s canonic time-spaces, seeking to focus on dancing and musicking as practices that begin within the body and to dig into the complex and messy viscera underneath the skin of those narratives that form the so-called jazz tradition.

“Counter-Bopaganda” and “Torn Riffs”

This chapter focuses on the subculture of young African Americans who developed forms of social dancing to bebop music as recounted to the author in oral history interviews with self-identified bebop dancers and as documented by Russian modern dancer/choreographer Mura Dehn in her film The Spirit Moves and in her drafts for an unfinished study on jazz dance. Dehn’s work reveals fascinating creative adaptations to bebop’s accelerating tempos and complex melodic structures in new and expanded dances such as the applejack, Jersey bounce, and bop lindy. Through these developments, dancers engaged in intricate metric and hypermetric play with bebop music—which they refer to as dancing “off-time”—while also embodying bebop’s “cool” aesthetic and the emergent cynicism and radicalism that shaped postwar African American political culture. Their experiences, and Dehn’s work to document them, demand a re-examination of the discursive work performed by bebop’s reputation as a music innately hostile to social dancing, a label that has less to do with the music’s difficulty than with a desire to position bebop as “art” rather than “entertainment.” The chapter closes with a discussion of “the problem of Dizzy Gillespie” to highlight and explore the historiographic challenges that discussion of social dance poses to canonic narrative positionings of bebop. It suggests that bebop is better understood as part of a contiguous spectrum of Black popular culture that thrived alongside, rather than in opposition to, rhythm & blues and other popular music genres.

Dancing Every Note

This chapter focuses emerges from the author’s experiences dancing at Jazz 966, a weekly “jazz club” night held at the Grace Agard Harewood Neighborhood Senior Center in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. For over twenty-five years, Jazz 966 has run as a weekly venue featuring jazz musicians with strong local, national, and international reputations. At Jazz 966, performers play music rooted in a broad array of post–Swing Era jazz styles including bebop, hard bop, and various forms of Latin jazz while the club has an active dance floor with audience members dancing socially to nearly every song. The club’s dancing patrons reveal the significance of dancing as a form of rigorous, participatory, and sensitive listening where those regarded as the best dancers express in their movement a subtle yet virtuosic musicality legible to other attendees who can see the ways they “dance every note.” Like the venue that houses it, Jazz 966 is integrated into the neighborhood’s community-based nonprofit infrastructure, yet this venue and the community center housing it are facing the same pressures of gentrification and rising property costs that more broadly threaten the social and cultural infrastructure of Black communities in Central Brooklyn. While self-consciously offering an alternative to a problematically romanticized “dying breed” narrative, this case study does emphasize the idea of precarity to articulate resonances between the discursive policing and erasure Black bodies face within jazz historical narratives as well as Black communities’ ongoing fight for sustained access to community spaces in which to move freely and to be corporeally present with jazz music.

“A Fine Art in Danger”

During the 1950s and 1960s, jazz music became solidly entrenched in America’s institutions of high art patronage as the music’s most prestigious venues shifted from popular clubs and ballrooms to concert halls and upscale summer festivals, most notably the Newport Jazz Festival. While for most professional jazz dancers, this period marked a time when the work “dried up,” there were several lindy hop and rhythm tap dancers who managed to access these spaces through their relationships with jazz historian Marshall Stearns. Stearns was a key player in the adoption of jazz history as an academic subject and an advocate for the serious study of Black vernacular dance. This chapter asks why Stearns’s efforts to “legitimize” and institutionalize jazz dance largely failed, given that his similar advocacy for jazz music clearly succeeded. It argues that Stearns’s folkloric conceptualization of “vernacular jazz dance” fell short of the successful “consensus narrative” he built for jazz music in that concertized adaptations of Black vernacular dance practices by choreographers such as Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey were not legible to Stearns as contiguous extensions of the traditional folk and popular dance forms he problematically fetishized as dying folk art in need of preservation. The discursive barrier Stearns built between the worlds of vernacular and concert dance, while intended to safeguard from cultural appropriation so-called authentic or vernacular jazz dance forms, ultimately reinforced primitivist narratives that discursively foreclosed many possibilities for dance as a vital creative partner in jazz music’s present or future.

“Its Bite and Its Feeling”

This chapter positions the quadroon balls of nineteenth-century New Orleans as a critical generative source of, and productive metaphor for, the complex of miscegenation fantasies that mark jazz as both seductive enough to excite our collective sense of subversion and quintessentially American enough to serve as the nation’s “classical music.” Building upon Emily Clark’s work on quadroon balls’ imbrication within a feedback loop between romanticized narrative and lived experience, which she terms the “plaçage complex,” the chapter demonstrates that the romanticization of New Orleans as jazz’s ostensible birthplace is rooted in discursive moves that long predate jazz itself. As such, this chapter draws a through-line from the early nineteenth-century genesis of quadroon balls through their mid-century boom and the fantastical white-authored travel narratives that made them tourist destinations and the ways they subsequently informed both New Orleans’ Storyville district and representations of antebellum plantation life in New York City stage revues. Through this analysis, the chapter draws uncomfortable yet necessary connections between jazz historical discourse, and especially its romanticization of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Orleans, and the discursive engines that maintained white supremacist structures during the nineteenth century and that remain active, if obfuscated, in the present.

“Lindy Hopper’s Delight”

As jazz music became popular entertainment nationwide, many dances circulated from social venues to professional floor shows and ballroom stages and then back again to amateur social practice. As musicians built careers playing for social dancers touring with professional dance acts, they learned to structure their performances collaboratively by listening visually to dancers’ bodies. Jazz musicians, and especially drummers, learned to accentuate dancers’ movements and engage them in playful “catching” games while also providing the stable rhythmic framework that encouraged dancers to participate kinesthetically with the music. This chapter explicates the dynamics of such relationships through the career of drummer Chick Webb, whose reputation was built on the strength of his close connection with lindy hop dancers during his tenure as house bandleader at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom throughout the 1930s. Specifically, it explores his close connections with Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a group of talented young dancers who became among the first to adapt this social partnered dance for the professional stage and, ultimately, for Hollywood films. Webb played regularly for elite lindy hop dancers in films, in touring stage shows, for amateur dance contests, and nightly at the Savoy, and his evolving relationship with them throughout the 1930s reveals the fluid boundaries between labor and play through which musicians and dancers co-creatively shaped jazz’s development.