Jazz dance history is rich and extensive. Part II explores this history
from its origins to today. For the purposes of this book, the history
than a detailed inventory of all aspects of jazz dance. Many things
at West African dance and its adaptations during slavery. She
the foundation for jazz dance in America. As West African rhythms
development of jazz music. Beginning with minstrelsy and
form. The jazz age of the early twentieth century, the hybrid styles
Jimmy Slyde. Photo from Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.music, and new dance techniques were all a part of the mix and
dance history beginning with the 1970s. Jazz dance continues its
contrasting jazz dance styles. As the genre accepts and adopts influences
nature. In addition to new jazz dance styles, the authors discuss the
chart, written by Tom Ralabate. It outlines vernacular jazz dance
dominated during each period. Although many movements overlap
United States. We now see that jazz dance is a global phenomenon.
dance landscape.
The African Origins of an American Art Form
Takiyah Nur Amin
Jazz dance, a uniquely American dance form, is rooted in and informed by
African movement idioms and aesthetics that traveled to the United States
with the trafficking of African people, commonly referred to as the Middle
Passage or the transatlantic slave trade. During the enslavement era, African
dances were transformed into African-American dances with the addition
of various movements derived from whites. Post-enslavement and throughout
the twentieth century, African-American dance evolved in several directions,
one of which was jazz dance. While the term jazz dance was not coined
until the 1920s, the primary ancestry of jazz dance can be found by studying
African dance forms and how they changed in the context of plantation life.
Africa is the world’s second largest continent, with more than fifty countries
and several thousand cultural groups. Which specific influences found
their way into jazz dance? What were the dances and movement aesthetics
of the Africans who came to the Western Hemisphere through this system
of forced migration? What indicates the presence of the African aesthetic
within the lexicon of jazz dance vocabulary today? And what are the implications
of seeing African-based movement and aesthetics as the primary
aspect of jazz dance, with other cultural influences adding onto that base?
Diversity in the Diaspora
While many students are somewhat familiar with the presence of people of
African descent in the West through the tragedy of the Middle Passage or transatlantic slave trade, it is arguable that fewer know about the presence
of Africans in the Americas prior to that long-standing historical incident.
Scholars have worked to document the presence and widespread influence of
African cultural groups in the West, not just before enslavement but also before
European conquest and the purported discovery of America by Christopher
Columbus in 1492.
Dr. Ivan Van Sertima painstakingly documented this crucial aspect of
early history in They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient
America.1 Van Sertima forwarded evidence of the African presence in the
“new world,” including details of expeditions launched from Mali to the West
in 1310, studies of analogous cultural traits between African cultural groups
and indigenous people of the Americas, and a thorough examination of artifacts,
stone sculptures (including the famous Olmec Heads), documents, and
other cultural data. Cheikh Anta Diop and John Henrik Clarke, among others,
have also written about the pre-enslavement presence of African people
in the West dating back to at least 750 b c, 2 leaving a rigorous body of work
for any student interested in detailed study of this topic.
While in-depth accounts of the movement/dance aesthetics of people of
African descent in the Western Hemisphere during this period are not readily
available, it is not a far-reaching assumption to suggest that even at that
time, the movement/dance aesthetics of African people traveled with them.
Regarding the much later transatlantic slave trade, it should be noted that
the first group of enslaved Africans to come to what we know today as the
first permanent settlement in the United States were brought as cargo by
the Dutch to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Notably, the Spanish brought enslaved
Africans even earlier in 1526, but it was to a shorter-lived settlement
near present-day Winyah Bay, South Carolina, the site of the first revolt of
enslaved Africans in the United States.
Slavery was central to the context of European colonial efforts to establish
trading settlements globally, with the Portuguese bringing enslaved Africans
to the Caribbean some ten years before Columbus’s exploits. As such, by the
time Africans were brought to the Jamestown colony, a million people of
African descent had been brought to various parts of South America and the
Caribbean to work in both the Portuguese and Spanish colonies.3
Information on the numbers of people transported to the West and cultural
specificity among groups of enslaved Africans can be found in the work
of Michael A. Gomez, who reports that “the total number of Africans imported
into the Americas is somewhere between 9.6 and 10.8 million, while
the total export figure is about 11.9 million. Concerning North America in
particular . . . the total import figure [is] at 480,930 or 481,000 for the sake
36 · Takiyah Nur Amin
of convenience. The total is 5 percent of the 10 million or so brought into
the New World. The Atlantic Slave Trade spanned some four hundred years,
from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. By 1650 the number of Africans
transported reached 10,000 per year.”4
Gomez presents a “Final Revision of Origins and Percentages of Africans
Imported into British North America and Louisiana” (table 6.1), which
details the national point of origin for persons coming from the continent
to the United States. While he accounts for 98.2 percent of enslaved Africans,
the remaining 1.8 percent is explained as persons from what Gomez
calls the “Mozambique-Madagascar contribution,” referring to people from
those African nations. Given this information, one can assess that the persons
accounted for in these percentages were primarily from the dominant
cultural groups in each land mass. Therefore, the ethnic groups below were
very likely the most prominent among Africans in the United States.5
It is important to note that these cultural groups brought their own distinctive
beliefs, cultural practices, lore, and rituals including dance through
the Middle Passage. By way of example, consider the dance masquerade
Gelede of the Yoruba people, a “lavish, colorful three-day festival” that honors
the spiritual potency of female energy and motherhood in the visage of
Iyanla, the “Great Mother.”6 By contrast, the Zigbliti dance of the peoples of
Cote d’Ivoire commemorates the daily pounding of corn.7 Cultural groups
also emphasized different parts of the body while dancing. According to Jacqui
Malone, “The Anlo-Ewe and Lobi of Ghana emphasize the upper body
while the Kalabari of Nigeria give a subtle accent to the hips . . . the Akan of
Ghana use the hands and feet in specific ways . . . strong contraction-release
Table 6.1. Final revision of origins and percentages of Africans imported into
British North America and Louisiana
Senegambia 14.5%
Sierra Leone 15.8%
Gold Coast (of Ghana) 13.1%
Bight of Benin 4.3%
Bight of Biafra 24.4%
West Central Africa 26.1%
Sources: Adapted from Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African
Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998), 29, and Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation
in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 126.
The African Origins of an American Art Form
movements of the pelvis and upper torso characterize both female and male
dancing in Agbor [Nigeria.]”8 This illustrates the salient point that African
dances were not and are not all the same across cultural groups and
landmasses.
Notably, during enslavement in the United States there was no attempt to
keep families or communities together or to maintain their unique cultural
differences and proclivities; the disregard for the diversity of African societies
was emblematic of most enslavement contexts. It was this lack of respect
for African cultural differences and an increased need to create a race-based
society in order to maintain the social status of white landowners that set the
stage for the blending of cultural perspectives and practices that later began
to emerge in this new context for Africans in America.
Now that a picture is appearing of the cultural diversity of the African
people who brought their traditions to the West, what were the dances that
emerged from the blending of those communities in the context of enslavement
and what are the aesthetic markers of these movement vocabularies?
How do these movement idioms become the basis for what we know today
as jazz dance?
From Slavery to the Stage
Buck Dance. Juba. Pigeon Wing. Buzzard Lope. Turkey Trot. Snake Hips.
Fish Tail. Fish Bone. Camel Walk. Cakewalk. Ring Shout. Water Dances.9
These names all refer to dances that emerged from the blending of various
African cultural groups during the period of enslavement (see table 6.2).
While the presence of drums and the act of drumming or using other musical
instruments (a central characteristic in many African cultural groups)
was routinely prohibited among enslaved people in various states, the presence
of dance persisted on plantations, whether openly for the pleasure
and entertainment of slave owners or in secret, sacred gatherings among
the enslaved only.10 Additionally, while not all slave owners encouraged or
supported the dancing of enslaved people, the aforementioned movement
traditions still emerge in the historical record and have been noted by many
dance writers. These dances have several characteristics in common:
Shout and Buzzard Lope11
The presence of these dance traditions in plantation settings is evidence
that dance was a communal expression that became the basis of popular
black dances in the U.S. post-enslavement. The diverse cultural groups noted
in table 6.1 necessarily blended, creating a rich collection of African-derived
movements that were later adopted, borrowed, and/or appropriated by dominant
cultural groups.
Dance scholar Katrina Hazzard-Donald notes that “though the ceremonial
context and specific movements varied from group to group, the basic
West African dance was strikingly similar across ethnic lines” and that “as
a result, interethnic assimilation in the new cultural environment was more
easily facilitated in dance than in other aspects of the African culture, such
as language.”12 As an illustration of this blending, consider that from 1724
to 1817, people of African, French, and Spanish descent mingled in Congo
Square, a plaza in present-day Louis Armstrong Park in the Treme neighborhood
of New Orleans.13 Congo Square was a central gathering place for music
and dance on Sundays where those assembled “did not constitute an audience
of detached observers; for they joined the performers by clapping their
hands, stomping their feet, patting their bodies, answering calls of chanters,
adding improvised intonations and ululations (shrills in sometimes piercing
Table 6.2. Ethnic groups by region
Senegambia Region Wolof, Fula, Mandinka
Sierra Leone Temne, Mende
Gold Coast [of Ghana] and Cote d’Ivoire Akan, Fon, Mande, Kru
Bight of Benin Yoruba, Ewe, Fon, Allada, Mahi
Bight of Biafra [including Gabon, Igbo, Tikar, Bubi, Bamileke,
Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea] Ibibio
West Central Africa [Angola] Kongo, Mbundu
Mozambique/Madagascar Macua/Malagasy
Sources: Adapted from Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African
Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998), 29, and Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation
in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 126.
The African Origins of an American Art Form · 39
pitches), singing songs that accompanied the dances, shaking gourd rattles,
and replacing dancers who became fatigued.” The dances at Congo Square,
often patterned after West and Central African circle or ring dances, evolved
over time to include European-derived styles accompanied by English-based
songs alongside African-derived dances.14
By the 1830s, black sociocultural dances were being popularized for white
audiences in minstrel shows, a form of theatrical entertainment that largely
caricatured black people. While folk/vernacular dances of English, Scottish,
and Irish origin were being performed as a part of this early theatrical tradition
in the United States, the tradition of blackface was also gaining popularity.
White performers covered their faces with black greasepaint or burnt
cork and performed hyperstylized, satirized versions of black dances derived
from plantation traditions; the most common finale of any minstrel show
included the audience participating in a Cakewalk.15
By the time vaudeville developed in the United States in the late 1870s,
touring groups of both black and white blackface-wearing minstrels had become
commonplace in American entertainment. Vaudeville shows, which
included such diversions as acrobats, jugglers, child performers, and chorus
girls, had become the vehicle through which ragtime, a style of music from
New Orleans, was being popularized. This new music, deeply grounded in
African aesthetic principles with its emphasis on syncopation, polyrhythm,
and percussive use of the piano, was the historical antecedent to jazz music.
Early jazz dance was primarily a folk/vernacular form of movement that
evolved alongside the development of jazz music in the United States; it was
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Figure 6.1. “The Bamboula” drawn in Congo Square, New Orleans, by E. W. Kemble, in
Century Magazine (1886).
Figure 6.2. The Cake Walk. Created and “copyright 1896 by The Strobridge Lith Co, Cinti
& N.Y.”
later amplified and hyperstylized for social and theatrical settings. The historical
result of the African cultural presence in the United States and the dance
traditions that emerged formed the basis for many American theatrical and
stage dances that birthed minstrelsy, vaudeville, and what we know today as
jazz dance. While it is important to recognize that European-derived couple
dances were being popularized in America in the early twentieth century,
social dances were circulating in black communities, which actively blended
them with Africanist elements; the result was a bevy of popular dances including
the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Suzy-Q, and the Lindy Hop.
Creative Threads, Aesthetic Connections
Scholars have worked to position the aesthetic characteristics of dances
derived from West African cultural groups as the primary antecedent to
dance forms that later emerged from black communities in the United
States. Africanist aesthetics as described in contemporary scholarship affirm
the centrality of African movement vocabulary, ethos, and approach to
movement invention in jazz dance. In his groundbreaking 1966 article, An
Aesthetic of the Cool: West African Dance, Yale University professor Robert
Farris Thompson described the aesthetic traits of West African music and
The African Origins of an American Art Form · 41
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dance as “the dominance of a percussive concept of performance, multiple
meter, apart playing and dancing, call-and-response, and, finally, the songs
and dances of derision.”16 Building on Thompson’s research, Marshall and
Jean Stearns, authors of the seminal text on jazz dance, described the characteristics
of African dance identifiable in the United States as the use of
bare feet, movement performed with bent knees, a crouched position with
flexibility at the waist, the imitation of animal movement, emphasis on improvisation,
the emphasis on centrifugal movement that “explodes outward
from the hips,” and the emphasis on a propulsive rhythm or “swing” quality
in the movement.17
Other dance scholars including Jacqui Malone, Kariamu Welsh, and Katrina
Hazzard-Donald affirm the perspectives of Thompson and the Stearns
when identifying the defining characteristic of African-based movement aesthetics.
18 The defining characteristics for jazz dance are essentially analogous
to the defining traits of primarily West African music and dance aesthetics
listed above. What the Stearns note “as a powerful, propulsive rhythm, which
can appear in the singing, the stamping, the clapping, and the dancing all
at one time” coupled with their identification of the basic traits of African-
American dance as being rooted in “improvisation, the Shuffle, the counterclockwise
circle dance, and the call-and-response pattern in voice, dance,
and rhythm”19 are firmly ensconced in the lexicon of jazz dance. While it
is evident that jazz dance today has absorbed other influences over time,
it is grounded in an Africanist aesthetic in terms of its fundamental movement
vocabulary, rhythmic structure, relationship to music, and approach
to movement invention.
Conclusion
Jazz dance is a uniquely American art form because of the amalgam of largely
African and European cultural influences that blended—either by force or by
choice—on this continent. While some recognize African cultural markers
in jazz dance, others have construed those aspects as a “contributory” force
in the development of the art form, or they have ignored them altogether.
This perspective is dubious because it suggests that somehow Africanist elements
were appended to a preexisting movement vocabulary that then gave
rise to jazz dance.
It has been demonstrated here that the dominant aesthetic inclinations of
jazz dance are decidedly Africanist; it becomes clear that other cultural influences
and dance styles found today within the lexicon of jazz dance were
affixed to African idioms and movement approaches in order for the dance
form we call jazz to emerge. By recognizing the primacy of African-derived
movements in the makeup of jazz dance and acknowledging the mixed heritage
of the form as ultimately the result of both cultural borrowing and appropriation
between African and European influences, the rich roots of jazz
dance emerge. We begin to understand this dance form as being grounded
not only in an African-derived movement vocabulary but also in an African
cultural ethos that continues to inform the dance today, even if its cultural
roots go unacknowledged or are otherwise obscured.
In this way, we understand that African people in the West before, during,
and after enslavement contributed not to jazz dance but to the larger national
and global dance landscape through jazz dance. By de-centering the primacy
of non-African cultural contributions, we can understand jazz dance as an
amalgamation of cultural influences that remains persistently African at its
core.
Notes
1. Ivan van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America
(New York: Random House, 2003), 32–35.
2. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook
Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 2007), 42–43.
3. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial
Modern Classics, 2010), 42.
4. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African
Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998), 18.
5. Ibid., 28, 29. Also see Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture,
and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2006), 126.
6. Barbara S. Glass, African-American Dance: An Illustrated History (Jefferson, NC: Mc-
Farland, 2007), 8.
7. Doris Green, “Traditional Dance in Africa,” in African Dance: An Artistic, Historical,
and Philosophical Inquiry, ed. Kariamu Welsh Asante (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press,
2002), 16.
8. Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African-American Dance
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 13.
9. Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance: From 1619 to Today (Pennington, NJ: Princeton
Book, 1988), 94.
10. Many states and plantation owners feared that enslaved Africans would use drums to
communicate with each other and as an aid in fostering rebellion. For more information, see
John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 35–36.
11. Emery, Black Dance, 89–96.
12. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-
American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 18.
The African Origins of an American Art Form · 43
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13. Freddie Williams Evans, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans (New Orleans:
University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011), 1.
14. Ibid., 89.
15. Harriett Lihs, Appreciating Dance: A Guide to the World’s Liveliest Art (Pennington,
NJ: Princeton Book, 2009), 81.
16. Robert Farris Thompson, “Dance and Culture, an Aesthetic of Cool,” African Forum
2 (1966): 88.
17. Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New
York: Macmillan, 1968), 14–15.
18. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, “Dancing under the Lash: Sociocultural Disruption, Continuity,
and Synthesis,” in African Dance, ed. Kariamu Welsh Asante (Trenton, NJ: Africa
World Press, 2002), 101-30; Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations
in African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Jacqui
Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African-American Dance (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1996); Kariamu Welsh Asante, “Commonalities in African Dance:
An Aesthetic Foundation,” in African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity, 3rd ed., ed. Kariamu
Welsh Asante and Molefi K. Asante (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1996); Kariamu Welsh
Asante, African Dance: An Artistic, Historical, and Philosophical Inquiry (Trenton: African
World Press, 1994); Kariamu Welsh Asante, The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993).
19. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 29.
Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
The history of jazz dance is intimately tied to the history of jazz music. Collectively,
as jazz expression with common histories and shared aesthetic
characteristics, their entwined history from emancipation to the 1970s is
complex. Their parallel histories reveal a multiplicity of aesthetic approaches,
interactions, and a fluidity of cultural, musical, and dance identities.1 Imagine
the jazz tree as it appears in the introduction surrounded by a community
dancing socially and performatively. The groove that the participants,
dancers, and musicians share is one that celebrates individual expression
yet moves as a collective. There is a give and take, shift and change in aesthetic
intention that honors the roots of the tree, celebrating the heritage and
legacy of jazz while new branches form as a result of new innovations. These
innovations reveal a history of jazz expression where the essence of jazz is
one of experimentation and discovery,2 embracing and absorbing various
influences while holding individualistic expression and freedom in high regard.
Thus jazz history is a landscape of evolving meanings, values, ideas,
sounds, movements, contestations, contradictions, pluralities, and multiple
constructions of “what is jazz.”3
In this chapter, the historical discussion of jazz and its West African roots
is framed by an examination of relevant jazz dance and music history literature
as well as oral history interviews. This discussion and analysis offers a
broad historical overview intended to introduce the sweep of jazz dance and
music history.
Setting the Stage
“Jazz is a physical and aural expression of the complexity and exuberance
of American culture and history.”4 Jazz dance and music emerged primarily
from what is known as African-American folk and vernacular5 music and
dance, lending creative inspiration to each other’s development.6 These early
dances incorporated improvisation and reflected “the power of the community
supporting the individual creative voice in a non-literal expression of
storytelling and connection to the human experience.”7 A competitive spirit
often imbued these early forms, and movements were characterized by a
weighted release into gravity, a dynamic spine, propulsive rhythms, and a
rhythmic, conversational approach to musical accompaniment.8
From the 1850s into the twentieth century, presentational performance
opportunities and venues for African-American musicians and dancers increased
and dance troupes such as the Whitman Sisters (1900–1943) became
incubators of dancing talent.9 In medicine shows, tent shows, minstrelsy,
vaudeville, gillies,10 and eventually the musical theater stage, movement details
of African-American folk and vernacular dances were reemerging in
new dances, or in dances once seen only on plantations, retaining their original
form while expanding through movement invention.11 The Cakewalk,
performed to the syncopated rhythms of the emerging ragtime music in the
1890s, was one of the earlier dances that served as an incubator for inventive
new steps.12 In July 1898, Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk opened on
Broadway featuring the Cakewalk performed to ragtime music.13
Varied dance and music practices were also meeting each other in the
cultural diversity of America where new ideas were explored. For example,
William Henry Lane, known as Master Juba, lived in the Five Points district
of New York City where Irish immigrants and African-Americans lived in
the mid-1800s. He enlivened the rhythmic structure of the Irish jig with
shuffle and African rhythms, adding the element of swing to his dancing.14
Sand dances and early tap dances followed, where the dancer used sand
on the floor and metal implements on shoes to create musical sounds and
rhythms. Dances retained African-like movements and propulsive rhythms
while assimilating the solo style of white dancers.15 African-American vernacular
dance became more syncopated, heading toward the swinging dance
forms such as the Charleston and Lindy, which would be called early jazz
dance.
Musically, in the mid-to late 1800s, two evolutions were occurring that
are considered the direct precursors of jazz: the blues and ragtime. The blues
46 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
used devices such as blue notes (notes said to fall “somewhere between the
cracks of the piano”), slurring, growls, call-and-response, and a loosening
of the rhythmic structure of the melody line from direct correspondence
with the basic downbeat, the strongest beat felt inside a musical bar. Ragtime
began to deliberately throw syncopations against downbeats as a kind of
counterpoint in equal standing with the downbeat.16
Jazz Arrives Swinging
Historians generally agree that jazz as a musical form was born in the early
twentieth century, most likely in New Orleans. Around 1902, African-
American folk and vernacular music began to swing through what is often
called triple-based rhythm described as “hot” and “bluesy” with jagged
rhythms and vocal humanlike sounds emitting from instruments.17 Shortly
thereafter, dance done to this new music would also be called jazz.18
African-American vernacular dance was also beginning to swing through
rhythms such as the Buck and Wing and the Shuffle. Thanks to a social dance
boom to the new jazz music around 1910, dance once seen primarily in after-
hours joints or “jook houses” and brothels moved into ballrooms.19 According
to jazz dance historians Marshall and Jean Stearns, the lyrics of Perry
Bradford’s 1909 dance-song “The Bullfrog Hop” guided a listener on how to
perform a dance with the phrase, “and do the Jazzbo Glide.”20 Group dance
forms gave way to partner dances,21 and animal dances such as the Turkey
Trot and Bunny Hug became the rage along with the hip isolations of Snake
Hips. The Texas Tommy emphasized the breakaway where couples broke
close body contact but kept contact with both hands, improvising steps of
their choice.22
“The heart and soul of jazz dance crystallized between the 1920s and
1940s.”23 The 1920s became known as the jazz age as this era embraced jazz
music and its accompanying dance form with a passion. New dances were
emerging from earlier African-American dances through experimentation,
extension, and creative development. The Charleston, both a social and a
theatrical stage dance, was highly syncopated and retained the patting of the
knees with the hands crossing over each other from an earlier dance called
Patting Juba.24 Previous New York City–based theatrical shows such as
Darktown Follies (1911) featured the Cakewalk, Ballin’ the Jack, and the Texas
Tommy and would serve as inspiration for future musicals.25 However, it was
the 1921 show Shuffle Along featuring the Charleston that brought Broadway
revues embracing jazz music and dance in vogue, pushing jazz expression to
the forefront in musical theater.26 Jazz social dances of this era were serving
Jazz Dance from Emancipation to 1970
Figure 7.1. The Charleston,
1923. By permission
of Tom Morgan.
as choreographic source material for stage performance while jazz tap, an
evolution of early sand and tap dances, showed increased sophistication in
its use of swing and complex rhythms.
Important musical innovations during this era include an increased emphasis
on solo improvisation and a further coarsening of musical timbres
and tones, strengthening the already voicelike quality of jazz music.27 Jazz
bands in the 1920s were developing greater ensemble rhythmic sophistication,
and Duke Ellington was drawing on vernacular idioms for novel invention,
“creating arrangements that left room for his players to contribute to
the rhythmic conception of the piece.”28 Additionally, jazz drummers were
building on rhythmic phrases created by jazz tappers.29
In the 1930s, jazz swing style music and jazz social dance were at their peak.
Dances emphasized the swinging body in space, moving not only through
the body’s weighted and under-curve release in and through space but also
through a propulsive, rhythmic conversation with the equally swinging and
propulsive jazz music. Harlem in New York City was at the height of the
Harlem Renaissance, and it was at the Savoy Ballroom on Lennox Avenue
48 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
between 140th and 141st Streets “where black musicians and dancers converged
and defined a period: music and dance at the Savoy drew attention to
the fact that the tradition of black music and dance forms were interrelated,
”30
and together were responsible for the swing phenomenon.
At the Savoy Ballroom, the greatest jazz social dance of all time, the Lindy
Hop, was born.31 Norma Miller and Frankie Manning, legendary Lindy Hop
dancers and members of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, credit Twistmouth George
as the creator of the Lindy at the Savoy when he threw his partner out into
what is now called the “swing-out.”32 This is similar to the breakaway, but in
the swing-out, couples not only break close body contact but also release one
hand, allowing for more improvisation.
Legendary jazz orchestras and artists such as the Duke Ellington Orchestra,
Fess Williams, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Chick Webb, Dizzy Gillespie,
and Cab Calloway were playing at the Savoy,33 and their music fueled the
creative energy that fed the development of new jazz social dances. In turn,
the musicians were creatively influenced by the dancers’ movements and
rhythms.34 Other jazz social dances and dance steps developed alongside
Figure 7.2. Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers at the Savoy Ballroom. New York World’s Fair
1939–1940 records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
Jazz Dance from Emancipation to 1970
the Lindy, such as the Big Apple, Shorty George, and Suzie Q, the majority
of them Savoy-originated.35 This new movement vocabulary continued the
trend of serving as source material for experimentation and innovation for
social, theatrical, and future concert jazz dance forms.
On Broadway, African-American choreographer Buddy Bradley was going
directly to jazz music for inspiration and jazz dance movement invention,
36 while jazz tap was gaining popularity in movies through the work of
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, John Bubbles, Fred Astaire, the Nicholas Brothers,
Jeni LeGon, and the Condos Brothers. Jazz tap artists Coles and Atkins
and Buster Brown were traveling with big bands like Duke Ellington’s on
the vaudeville and club circuit and appearing at New York clubs such as the
Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater. These artists contributed significantly
to jazz through their own dance creations, movement style, and manner of
rhythmic, conversational exchanges with musicians. For most of these jazz
artists, creative movement ideas originated in the vernacular and social jazz
dances, arose from the rhythmic impulse of swinging jazz music, and were
embellished for the performance stage.37
A similar phenomenon was evolving with the Lindy Hop dancers. Professionals
such as Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers were performing in clubs, films, on
Broadway, and in concert halls including Radio City Music Hall. The routines
of these Lindy Hop groups embellished the Lindy with moves not generally
seen on the social dance floor except at contests,38 such as the aerial moves
(throwing a partner in the air) that can be seen in the classic Lindy film sequence
from Hellzapoppin’ (1941). Frankie Manning is credited with the first
Lindy aerial move around 1935 or 1936 and for creating ensemble dancing for
the professional Lindy Hop dance teams, although individual couple dancing
continued to coexist with ensemble dancing in performance.39 Norma
Miller credits Herbert “Whitey” White with creating the first choreographed
Lindy routines, including the first for the performance stage.40
Mura Dehn, a Russian émigré, arrived in America in 1930 to study and
research jazz dance and she focused on jazz in Harlem, particularly at the
Savoy Ballroom. Subsequently, she founded the Academy of Jazz dedicated
to the research, teaching, and performance of jazz dance. For Dehn, jazz
dance could be seen in the current social dances, especially the Lindy Hop,
and in the practices of the African-American tap dancers,41 and classes at
her Academy of Jazz included African primitive, improvisational, and early
American jazz expression.42 In Dehn’s words, early American jazz expression
was inclusive of “all interpretations of modern jazz that we are familiar
with . . . ragtime, Charleston, truckin, swing, boogie-woogie.”43 Dehn would
later create a landmark documentary, The Spirit Moves (1950), that captured
50 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
not only these early jazz traditions but jazz dance performed to the upcoming
stylistic innovation in jazz music, bebop, by dancers such as Clarence
“Scoby” Strohman, Jeff Asquiew, Leroy Appins, and Milton “Okay” Hayes.
Dehn was also a principal dancer in the 1930s with choreographer Roger
Pryor Dodge. Dodge began writing about jazz music in the 1920s with one
of his best-known articles appearing in the Dancing Times, an English review
Figure 7.3. Mura Dehn and Roger Pryor Dodge. Dance Recital of Concert Jazz, January
22, 1938. 92nd Street Y.M.H.A., New York. Roger Pryor Dodge Collection, courtesy of
Pryor Dodge.
Jazz Dance from Emancipation to 1970 · 51
primarily focused on ballet. Entitled “Negro Jazz,” Dodge’s article argued
that the term jazz was being used indiscriminately, ignoring the true nature
of jazz expression. His fascination with jazz music led Dodge to create and
perform dances to well-known jazz tunes such as “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,”
”44
“Black and Tan Fantasy,” and “St. Louis Blues.
Shifting Styles, Shifting Tastes
Swing began to decline, and the early 1940s saw the development of a new
jazz music style called bebop. Propelling jazz music into the status of an art
form, bebop retained a swing rhythm but was a more rhythmically complex
sound, with rapid tempos and dissonant chords that provided a sharp
contrast to swing.45 Musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk,
and Charlie Parker began to jam together, experimenting with new ideas
through improvisation. Max Roach and Kenny Clarke moved away from the
traditional role of drummers as time keepers to a dialogic manner of accompaniment,
“all of which made dancing to this music a somewhat precarious
endeavor.”46 The big bands of the swing era were replaced with the soloist-
centered combo, and many musicians wanted jazz music to stand on its own
terms free of the obligation to the dancer.47 Concurrently, there was a lag in
social dance from 1945 to 1954, during which time a 20 percent tax on dance
floors to support World War II closed down many ballrooms. Musicians
then moved to smaller clubs.
Bebop had a significant impact on jazz dance. Although Lindy Hoppers
at the Savoy were able to dance to “bebop-inflected swing,”48 jazz, as heard
in bebop, was no longer the popular culture music of the day as swing had
been. Jazz as social dance music was being replaced by other musical forms
such as Latin, rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, and funk, the latter two with
rhythmic qualities that often stood in contrast to jazz music, in particular, a
lack of swing. When the public returned to social dancing, they were dancing
to these new rhythms.
One exception to the lack of large ballroom spaces was New York City’s
Palladium Ballroom at 53rd and Broadway (1948–1966). Here, Latin dances
such as the Mambo and Cha Cha were danced in conversation with Latin
bands led by legends such as Tito Puente. Influenced by Latin rhythms and
music from Cuba, Dizzy Gillespie was also playing at the Palladium, experimenting
with a sound that would be called Latin jazz. Latin dances themselves
share aesthetic characteristics that are core to jazz dance, such as “a
more dynamic and flexible spine, weight shifts propelled by core body movement
often resulting in weight suspended between the feet, flexed knees,
centrality of polyrhythms over body lines, and improvisation closely linked
52 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
Figure 7.4. Jimmy
Slyde. Photo from
Jerome Robbins Dance
Division, The New York
Public Library for the
Performing Arts, Astor,
Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
to musical structures.”49 This Latin trend remained critical to jazz music and
would eventually influence concert jazz dance in the decades to come.
Social dance began to change rhythmic identity, and new dance forms
emerged, especially rock ’n’ roll dances, albeit from the legacy of the jazz social
dances. However, several dancers continued to perform onstage to past
and emerging jazz music. Frankie Manning experimented with his group,
the Congaroo Dancers, alongside musicians such as Cab Calloway. Manning
incorporated tap, Latin dance, and “jazz dances” while performing and choreographing
dances inspired by the Lindy Hop.50 Jazz tappers Jimmy Slyde,
Baby Laurence, and Buster Brown actively explored performance to bebop
music, with Laurence moving rhythms from his feet up, “playing his body
like a percussion instrument.”51 Talley Beatty, who trained with Katherine
Dunham, collaborated with Duke Ellington in the 1950s and 1960s, creating
choreography for several of Ellington’s longer works.52
Jazz Dance from Emancipation to 1970 · 53
At this same time, Broadway’s taste began to shift from revue-style musicals
embracing jazz dance to narrative musicals embracing modern dance
and ballet.53 This new emphasis, however, did not entirely leave jazz dance
behind. Katherine Dunham was creating jazz dances for movie musicals
such as Cabin in the Sky (1943) and the finale of Stormy Weather (1943),
which also featured the Nicholas Brothers in one of their classic duets. The
vibrancy of jazz dance influenced an innovation that would eventually be
called theatrical jazz dance. This form, however, would begin to diverge from
the development of jazz dance to date. Ballet choreographers such as George
Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, Robbins in particular as seen in West Side
Story, experimented by merging the jazz idiom with a ballet base, shifting
the focus from rhythm to line and space.54 Broadway choreographers often
turned to forms of music other than the rhythmically dense bebop, such as
cool and symphonic jazz; music styles with differing rhythmic priorities also
often stood in contrast to earlier swing-based jazz styles.55
During this transitional era, choreographers Jack Cole and Bob Fosse
were integrating the dynamics of jazz inside their theater dance style for
film and Broadway. Cole created his own style for nightclub performance,
film, and stage with a goal to create a stylized form called theater dance that
used syncopated rhythms.56 Cole’s 1947 Sing, Sing, Sing, to a Benny Goodman
recording, is described as a mixture of African-American social dance
forms (particularly the Lindy/Jitterbug)57 with modern dance and East Indian
dance technique “danced to the rhythms of swing and the tempos of
bop.”58 Sing, Sing, Sing’s innovative style, identified at that time as “modern
jazz dance,” was a sensation and would soon be emulated by choreographers
for stage, film, and television,59 especially on the popular TV variety shows
hosted by Perry Como, Jackie Gleason, and Ed Sullivan.
Inspired by Cole, choreographers and teachers were grappling with how
to teach this new style in the classroom under the name jazz,60 while they
were extending jazz dance into alternate directions merging jazz sensibility
with their ballet and modern dance training. As fusion, rock ’n’ roll, disco,
and funk music became the popular culture music of the day, dance called
jazz adopted these music styles with a passion, whether in the classroom, on
Broadway, or in film. A catalyst for this occurred when Bob Fosse wedded
jazzlike dance to rock ’n’ roll style music first in Sweet Charity (1966) and
then in Pippin (1972).61
Conclusion
As more and more classes called jazz dance began to appear in studios around
the country and Europe, choreographers, teachers, and dancers continued
54 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
experimenting, asking, “What is jazz dance?”62 An examination of the literature
written from the 1950s and forward into the 1980s reveals distinct
conceptualizations concerning jazz dance and its aesthetic core as new innovations
called jazz were emerging. On one hand, writers and practitioners
argued that jazz is rooted in West African and African-American practices.
They identified innovators who hailed back to the turn of the century and
included dancers Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, John Bubbles, Buster Brown,
Nicholas Brothers, Condos Brothers, Fred Astaire, jazz social dancers of the
Savoy Ballroom, and the concert stage Lindy Hoppers. Jazz dance, they argued,
is shaped by the dancer’s conversational relationship to music, wherein
the dancer is often considered a musician. Creative ideas and movements
arise from jazz music structure and its rhythmic impulse, particularly music
that swings. In this approach to jazz dance (identified as rhythm-generated
in this book), movement and motional qualities are strongly rooted in the
West African forms and the African-American jazz social dance practices
that emphasize a weighted and swinging body. Improvisation is creation in
the moment of performance, and jazz dance is performed to jazz music and
jazz rhythms.63
On the other hand, different writers and practitioners discussed the emergence
of the new form of jazz that was then called modern jazz dance.64
While a nod was often given to jazz’s West African roots, the discussion
shifted in focus to the fact that this new form of jazz came from the influence
of Jack Cole and choreographers such as Jerome Robbins and Matt Mattox.
Merging jazz styles with other genres such as ballet and modern, jazz then
became a concert stage form (called theatrical jazz dance in this book). Identified
innovators include jazz teachers Gus Giordano, Bob Fosse, and Luigi.
Many choreographers who practiced this jazz style and were interviewed
about this new form located the essence of jazz in its energy and emotion.
They emphasized visual shapes that belonged to jazz including positions
and stylistic walks. Improvisation was evidenced by personal nuance and
in the fact that jazz draws from many sources; therefore, jazz is constantly
changing, further evidence of its improvisational personality. Finally, they
argued, jazz music is not necessary for the performance of jazz dance. In fact,
by using music other than jazz and by embracing ballet and modern dance
techniques, restrictions were lifted, allowing new innovations in jazz dance
technique.65
In 1959, Marshall Stearns commented that jazz dancers and choreographers
were losing the excitement and a particular way of shaping jazz dance.
Could it be, he asked, that jazz dancers were ignoring jazz rhythms?66 Further,
when asked in an interview about the new form of “modern jazz dance,”
Jazz Dance from Emancipation to 1970 · 55
Cole said he did not wish to take credit for the movement.67 To call his dance
modern jazz was a distortion of his style. His choreographic concern was
not with jazz dance at all but with his stylized form of theater dance using
syncopated rhythms. Real jazz dancing, he said, could be found in the dance
halls in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the social dances like the Camel Walk,
the Charleston, and the Lindy. Moreover, he felt that what was called jazz
dance at the time of the interview was “closer in style to ‘pop’ music than to
jazz.”68 The jazz tree was now besieged by the give and take, shift and change
in aesthetic intention between its roots and innovations. So where was jazz
to go, and what was it going to do?
Jazz has been seen as a music and dance style, as a technique, and as an
attitude.69 The very nature of jazz as a way of making music and dance has
allowed for various ideas about the identity of jazz to be and continue to
be constructed.70 Today there are multiple styles of dance called jazz that
embrace, to various degrees, fundamental qualities associated with jazz expression.
The word jazz remains complicated, highly contested, and often
undefined. But more than anything, the defining characteristics of jazz dance
remain experimentation and diversity.
Notes
1. David Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 41.
2. George Lewis, “Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York,
1970–1985,” in New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Jasmine
Farah Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 79–80.
3. Ake, Jazz Cultures, 2; David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark, Jazz/
Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 1–10.
4. “Jazz Dance,” The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed., ed. Charles Hiroshi
Garrett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
5. The authors take the point of view that vernacular is not meant to be seen as “less” than
other forms such as ballet and thus devoid of technique. Rather, vernacular stands as equally
valuable as all other forms, styles, and techniques of dance.
6. Barbara Englebrecht, “Swinging at the Savoy,” Dance Research Journal 15, no. 2 (Spring
1983): 4; Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance
(New York: Macmillan, 1968).
7. “Jazz Dance,” Grove Dictionary.
8. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 32.
9. Ibid, 85.
10. Gillies were traveling song and dance shows associated with carnivals in the late
1800s and early 1900s.
11. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 25–84; Jill Flanders Crosby, “Will the Real Jazz Dance
Please Stand Up? A Critical Examination of the Roots and Essence of Jazz with Implications
for Education” (EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1995), 102.
56 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
12. “Jazz Dance,” Grove Dictionary.
13. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 118–20.
14. Ibid, 44; Billy Siegenfeld interview, New York City, 1992.
15. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 37.
16. Siegenfeld interview; Bob Boross, “Image of Perfection: The Free Style Dance of Matt
Mattox” (MA thesis, Gallatin Division, New York University, 1994), 27.
17. James Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History (New York: Doubleday,
1979), 57–71.
18. According to Porter, the name jazz was contested. Some musicians, he states, regarded
jazz as a derogatory term (insinuating pop culture) rather than as an elevation of the
development of African-American folk music forms. Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called
Jazz? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 11–18.
19. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-
American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 121–34.
20. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 104.
21. Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin,’ 81.
22. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 129.
23. “Jazz Dance,” Grove Dictionary.
24. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 29.
25. Boross, “Image of Perfection,” 28–29.
26. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 122.
27. Porter, What is This Thing Called Jazz? 32.
28. Ibid, 37.
29. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 140.
30. Englebrecht, “Swinging at the Savoy,” 4.
31. Smithsonian Institution, Jazz Oral History Project: Frankie Manning, audiotape;
Smithsonian Institution, Jazz Oral History Project: Norma Miller, audiotape.
32. Smithsonian Institution, Manning and Miller audiotapes.
33. Smithsonian Institution, Manning, audiotape.
34. Katherine Kramer interview, Saugerties, NY, 1995.
35. Smithsonian Institution, Manning, Miller.
36. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 160–69.
37. Crosby, Will the Real Jazz, 120–22.
38. Smithsonian Institution, Manning.
39. Ibid.
40. Smithsonian Institution, Miller.
41. Mura Dehn, Papers on African-American Social Dancing ca. 1869–1987. New York
Public Library Dance Collection, 1991.
42. “Jazz: A Folk Dance,” Dance Magazine 19 (8) (1945): 8.
43. Ibid.
44. Pryor Dodge, “Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance,” http://www.pryordodge.com, accessed February
23, 2013.
45. Crosby, Will the Real Jazz, 124; Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz, 54; Constance
Valis Hill, “From Bharata Natyam to Bop,” Dance Research Journal 33, no. 2 (Winter 2001):
29–39.
46. Ake, Jazz Cultures, 53.
Jazz Dance from Emancipation to 1970 · 57
47. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz, 54–100.
48. Hill, “From Bharata Natyam to Bop.” Valis Hill comments that to dance to the faster
bebop rhythms, “dancers slowed their tempos to halftime, absorbing into their undulating
bodies the percussions formerly reserved for the feet,” 30.
49. Juliet McMains, “Dancing Latin/Latin Dancing: Salsa and DanceSport,” in Ballroom,
Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, ed. Julie Malnig, 302–22
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 304.
50. Smithsonian Institution, Manning.
51. Hill, “From Bharata Natyam to Bop,” 30; Smithsonian Institution, Jazz Oral History
Project: Jimmy Slyde, audiotape; Buster Brown interview, New York City, 1993.
52. PBS, “Free to Dance, Biographies, Talley Beatty,” http://www.pbs.org/wnet/freetodance
/biographies/beatty.html.
53. Crosby, Will the Real Jazz, 130–31.
54. Ibid, 129–32.
55. Ibid.
56. Clayton Cole, “It’s Gone Silly,” in Anthology of American Jazz Dance, ed. Gus Giordano
(Evanston, IL: Orion, 1975), 73.
57. Terry Monaghan, “Introducing Jazz, Jump & Jive.” Authentic Jazz Dance Journal,
1(1988): 11-13. The terms Lindy Hop and Jitterbug are often used synonymously. Research by
Terry Monaghan reveals that Lindy was sometimes the name of a step within the dance, and
sometimes the name of the dance itself. He argues that African-American dancers Lindy
Hopped while white imitators Jitterbugged. After World War II the words become almost
interchangeable.
58. Hill, “From Bharata Natyam to Bop,” 31.
59. Ibid.
60. Boross, “The Image of Perfection,” 38–39.
61. Billy Siegenfeld interview, New York City, 1995.
62. Boross, “The Image of Perfection,” 38–39.
63. Crosby, Will the Real Jazz, 51–90.
64. Ibid., 59–65.
65. Ibid.
66. Stearns, “Is Modern Jazz Dance Hopelessly Square,” Dance Magazine, 1959.
67. Cole, “It’s Gone Silly,” 73.
68. Ibid.
69. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz, xv; Crosby, Will the Real Jazz, 68–69, 319.
70. Ake, Garret, and Goldmark, Jazz/Not Jazz, 1–10.
Copyright . ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.
58 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
Jazz Dance from 1970 into the Twenty-First Century
Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
As dancers from the 1970s to the present, our bodies tried on many styles
called jazz in the classroom and in performance that told us multiple and
sometimes divergent stories. As audience members at many musicals employing
“jazz” dance and at jazz concert dance performances, we experienced
the same: multiple and divergent jazz stories. Jazz continues experimenting
and innovating, blending and fusing, and in its wake, leaving contestations
and contradictions.
Jazz music has a parallel story. Musicians such as Miles Davis continued
the jazz practice of blending and fusing, keeping one foot rooted in tradition
while keeping an eye on the new and the inventive, although receiving criticism
for straying beyond the edges of jazz.1 Other musicians such as Wynton
Marsalis have caused fervent debates about what is jazz.2 These outer edges
of the genre seem curiously unpredictable and irregular, but they were and
are jazz nonetheless.
Over time it became obvious that the genesis for jazz dance and music,
the fusing of West African rhythms and movement roots and European influences,
would be retained by some and released by others. What remained
central was its changing nature, an evolving form that was a reflection of the
day. Ultimately each decade from the 1970s on would be distinct, yet some
core aspects remained if only by hints and shadows: rhythmic movement,
pelvic movement, elements of its social dance beginnings, entertainment,
and vast artistic explorations.
In this chapter we will discuss these multiple jazz stories. The thematic
lenses we use will include experimentation in jazz dance and music, jazz as
a social, theatrical, and concert dance form, revival movements, and jazz
dance in the studios. This approach is based on the idea that each lens looks
back into the others; social dance forms influenced what was on the concert
and theatrical stage, and the stage influenced social dance forms and what
was taught in the studios. Concurrently, of course, what was taught and innovated
in the studios influenced social dance and dance on the theatrical
and concert stage.
Jazz Dance Continues Experimenting and Developing
The decades following the 1960s were a time of change. Experimentation
flourished as jazz dance and music continued to evolve. The radiation of
jazz outward from its origins embraced many new styles, absorbing or being
absorbed and thus changing the nature of jazz. Broadway, film, and television
were bringing more attention to jazz music and dance. Many jazz artists
were not sure where jazz would go, and a new era was introduced with
many voices and dancing bodies on many continents. The jazz tree now had
strong roots, and branches were flourishing: a Swedish swing dance revival,
Japanese hip-hop culture, British club jazz/funk competitions, and a Chicago
house dance scene. Different music trends had people social dancing
to new styles of music, producing new dance trends. Jazz revival movements
inspired new examinations of past jazz trends, concert jazz dance companies
were flourishing, and jazz classes were named after various styles and
fusions: Broadway jazz, jazz funk, authentic jazz, modern jazz, street jazz,
theatrical jazz, and concert jazz, to name a few. Some jazz teachers were
fusing ballet and modern dance into the jazz blend using all forms of music,
while others preferred jazz dance’s vernacular roots and an attachment to
swing rhythms.
Urban and Social Dance Styles Lend Their Persuasion
Elvis Presley inspired a generation of social dancers with his gyrating hips;
his style was a borrowed continuum of the African-American aesthetic. Jazz
social dance was reinvented as rock ’n’ roll dance. Motown, funk, and disco
music styles followed, and so did America’s social dancing. Cholly Atkins,
of the tap dance duo Coles and Atkins, was now actively choreographing for
Motown performers. Disco was part of the jazz dance spectrum, for dancers
were dancing in a “jazz way,”3 and all these new styles were infiltrating Hollywood
in movies such as Flash Dance (1983) and Beat Street (1984).
60 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
The 1980s was a particularly interesting time for jazz dance when seen
through the social dance lens. The improvisatory practice important to
early jazz dance and much of jazz music could be found in hip-hop culture,
principally the urban social dances or “party dances.” Dance scholar Halifu
Osumare argues that the hip-hop aesthetic of Rennie Harris, director and
founder of Puremovement, a hip-hop dance theater company, is an aspect of
the evolutionary spectrum of jazz and the Africanist continuum.4 Jazz could
indeed be seen in many of the urban dance styles of the 1980s and 1990s. Jazz
could be identified in the “performance of attitude,” in the “aesthetic of the
cool,” the “looking smart,” and indeed all aspects of the competitive spirit
that had dancers “laying it down” or “turning it out.”5 The Bronx “hooky
sets,” when young people skipped school to hang out, were impromptu opportunities
not only to date but also to show your stuff, to battle, and to compete
in much the same way as the Savoy Ballroom challenges. Discothèques,
park jams, block parties, and gang-hosted dance sessions on vacant lots or
basketball courts always celebrated personal style,6 an aspect that is part of
the jazz legacy.
A resurgence in Latin jazz and the development of Latin rhythms came
in the 1970s and continues to this day.7 The popularity of the sounds and
movements of Salsa, essentially an evolution of the Cuban Son, was felt and
seen on social dance floors internationally.8 Later on, tap dancers such as
Katherine Kramer and Max Pollack started translating complex Latin musical
rhythms into their feet as a new branch of their performance aesthetic.
Revival Movements
The popularity of jazz tap (also known as rhythm tap) declined somewhat
in the 1950s. However, in the 1960s, Marshall Stearns was instrumental in
bringing jazz tappers back onto the stage at the Newport Jazz Festival.9 By
the 1970s, tap dancers such as Dianne Walker, Brenda Bufalino, Jane Gold-
berg, and Katherine Kramer “were all on synchronic missions to breathe life
back into” the legendary hoofers and virtuosos of tap.10 These artists performed
with tap masters so that the art of jazz tap would not be lost, while
standing on the shoulders of the previous generation. They were popular
performers and teachers holding down the rhythm-generated approach by
dancing to jazz music.
In the 1980s, Frankie Manning, who had been out of the spotlight and
working at the post office for forty years, found himself courted by dancers
from the West Coast interested in the Savoy-style Lindy Hop. Manning
returned to the spotlight, and the Lindy Hop revival was a West Coast
Jazz Dance from 1970 into the Twenty-First Century · 61
inspiration and an East Coast phenomenon. Meanwhile, in London, the Jiving
Lindy Hoppers under the direction of Terry Monaghan were enjoying
critical acclaim performing jazz social dances and rock ’n’ roll dances.
Theatrical and Concert Jazz Dance
Dance in Broadway musicals continued to defy easy categorization under the
banner of theatrical jazz dance. Bob Fosse influenced theatrical jazz dance
with his distinctive style. Dance in Broadway musicals such as Cats (1982)
and A Chorus Line (1975) had a strong ballet and modern base and worked
with show tune musical styles. Other Broadway musicals such as Sophisticated
Ladies (1981) and Black and Blue (1989) had a closer connection to the
roots of jazz dance. Choreographers for these latter musicals included jazz
legends such as Donald MacKayle, Henry LeTang, and Frankie Manning,
who all brought their knowledge of jazz dance from earlier generations back
to the contemporary Broadway stage.
Concert jazz companies were flourishing in various locations around
North America, such as Danny Buraczeski’s JAZZDANCE company, located
first in New York City (1979) and later in Minneapolis.11 The Canadian company
Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal (BJM) was serving up a fusion of ballet
technique and jazz shapes and toured extensively to concert stages around
the world. Canadian tap dancer Heather Cornell founded Manhattan Tap
and frequently collaborated with jazz musician Ray Brown. Both artists created
new music and dance inspired by and in conversation with each other.12
Dancer and choreographer Dianne McIntyre brought her own movement
vocabulary into collaborations with jazz musicians such as Cecile Taylor and
Max Roach beginning in the 1970s.13 Mickey Davidson, who worked with
McIntyre’s company Sounds in Motion, also worked with Norma Miller’s
Lindy Hoppers as well as with Cecile Taylor and jazz musician Sun Ra. Dedicated
to exploring and performing the interlocking relationship between
music and dance, Davidson continues to maintain Norma Miller’s choreography
with a company known as the Savoy Swingers.14
Jazz Dance in the Studios
The 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s were a vital but complex time in jazz dance education.
Teachers and practitioners were using popular music such as rock and
funk, yet they taught under the banner of “jazz.” The order of the day seemed
to have most labeling the work generically or with descriptors. What was
jazz dance, and could it be separated from jazz music and still be called jazz
dance? Some teachers argued yes; others argued no. Several teachers codified
62 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
Figure 8.1. JAZZDANCE.
Dancers: Jane Blount
and Robert Smith, 1987.
Photo by Jack Mitchell.
By permission of Danny
Buraczeski.
their individual technique so that the form could be studied, mastered, and
taught by multiple teachers.
New York City classes were led by names such as Luigi, Chuck Kelley,
Phil Black, Frank Hatchett, Fred Benjamin, Nat Horne, and Lynn Simon-
son, all experimenting with what is jazz and how to teach it. Many classes
adopted the popular culture music of the era and focused on line, shape, set
choreography, and the addition of ballet and modern dance aesthetics. Lynn
Simonson, creator of the Simonson jazz technique, worked more often with
jazz music and incorporated elements of improvisation during class.
Pepsi Bethel taught in New York City for many years; he identified his
work as “authentic jazz” and held to no certified training system other than
the one he had lived.15 Bethel began his campaign for the preservation of
authentic jazz dance forms in the early 1960s, ultimately establishing Pepsi
Bethel’s Authentic Jazz Dance Theater in 1971. He taught well into the 1980s,
and he remained dedicated to the jazz idiom as a reflection and expression
of his life force.16
Jazz Dance from 1970 into the Twenty-First Century · 63
Other New York City–based jazz artists in the 1980s included Jo Jo Smith
and Betsy Haug.17 Smith’s class used multiple genres of popular culture
music. He emphasized “training with a musicality.” To match the “feel” of
combinations to the “feel” of the music, he harnessed traditional jazz lines
and pulled from his early Afro-American and Latino music and dance influences.
18 Haug’s style was influenced by Latin rhythms and the social dances
born of African-American culture.19 Although very familiar with the Broadway
jazz style, Haug was dedicated to musicality that required discovering a
personal soulfulness and connecting the dancer to the feeling of the music.20
In the 1980s and ’90s, jazz dance classes could be found around the world.
European classes were similar to those in North America, as many American
nationals had emigrated and were teaching jazz dance abroad. Some had
a social dance approach, mostly referencing the swing era, teaching Lindy
Hop, Balboa, or boogie-woogie. New York septuagenarian John Clancy is
credited with being the first swing camp instructor at the now famous Herr.ng
Dance Camp in Sweden. Matt Mattox taught in Europe and America
while he was based in France. Calling his jazz free style, he worked in a concert/
theatrical style that started in the 1970s and continued into the 2000s.
Gus Giordano, founder of Giordano Dance Chicago (1963), began the Jazz
Dance World Congress (1990), dedicated to exploring jazz dance history and
its future through classes and seminars. Danny Buraczeski offered a symposium
on teaching jazz dance at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in
June 2012. All in all, the many exponents of jazz dance held to many definitions
and descriptions of the idiom.
Jazz and the Spirit of Change
From Manhattan to strip malls around North America, studio jazz dance
classes continue to be represented by varied styles often distinct from the
aesthetic essences of early jazz dance and music. Since jazz has always been
known as a form that was born of and allowed for fusion, this makes perfect
sense. Jazz music and dance are often an aural and visual reflection or
snapshot of the times, ever changing and evolving. There are many jazz
techniques thriving locally and internationally as they are codified and then
widely disseminated through organizations and associations that hold conferences
and workshops or have exam-oriented syllabi.
Examples of these varied styles can be seen in diverse companies. Two
examples of concert companies holding down a deep commitment to jazz
music and dance are Jump Rhythm Jazz Project and Decidedly Jazz Dance-
works. Jump Rhythm Jazz Project was formed in 1990 in New York City by
Billy Siegenfeld, and it relocated to Chicago in 1993. The company focuses on
64 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
Figure 8.2. Decidedly Jazz Danceworks. Dancers: Ivan Nunez Segui, Dinou Marlett
Stuart, and Sarisa F de Toledo, 2012. Photo by Trudie Lee. By permission of Decidedly
Jazz Danceworks.
transforming jazz or jazz-based rhythms into a body music that makes both
the musical accents and dynamic feel of those rhythms visible.21 Decidedly
Jazz Danceworks was founded by Vicki Willis, Hannah Stilwell, and Michèle
Moss in 1984 in Calgary, Canada.22 “The core aesthetic of DJD’s work is
African-rooted and swing-based with jazz music at its heart.” They often use
live music for their performances.23 The company runs a large dance school
in addition to its performing company. Such companies view jazz dance and
jazz music as equal, conversational partners in the creative process and in
performance. Movement begins from within a vernacular body that releases
into gravity and emphasizes movement initiated from the inside out.
Examples of concert companies with a theatrical jazz dance aesthetic include
River North Dance Chicago and Odyssey Dance Theatre. River North
has been performing nationally and internationally since 1989 under the artistic
direction of Frank Chaves. The company is committed to the presentation
and preservation of jazz-based contemporary dance, and it boasts a
diverse repertoire.24 Odyssey Dance Theatre of Salt Lake City and now in its
Jazz Dance from 1970 into the Twenty-First Century · 65
Figure 8.3. River North Dance Chicago. Hanna Bricston and Michael Gross in Simply
Miles, Simply Us by artistic director Frank Chaves, 2011. Photo by Jennifer Girard. By
permission of River North Dance Chicago.
eighteenth year is founded and directed by Derryl Yeager. Its dancing combines
ballet, jazz, modern, hip-hop, tap, ballroom, Broadway, and vaudeville
in a hybrid form.25 The aesthetic essence of theatrical jazz dance companies,
including but not limited to River North and Odyssey, lies in the fact that
jazz is a highly stylized reflection of the individual. Movement is characterized
by a strong, powerful, and placed body; the dancer uses placement not
unlike ballet but different in its grounded relationship to space, its driving
quality through the pelvis, its outstretched and energetic port de bras, and its
asymmetry. Here artists often form alliances with varied music styles rather
than with jazz music alone. Regardless, they retain the “aesthetic of the cool”
present among jazz dance styles.26
Conclusion
To understand the diversity of jazz dance expression today is daunting. From
a roots-grounded approach to bold innovations and everything in between
is a rich assortment of possibilities, options, and hybrids. When considering
66 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
the range from social dance to concert work, from jazz dancing tied to jazz
music to jazz dancing that allows contemporary music, jazz dance represents
a multiplicity of options engendered by the hundred-plus years of jazz dancing
that have gone by. Jazz music is no different. Some support the “classical”
jazz music style that adheres to techniques laid down by generations of
jazz musicians while simultaneously critiquing other jazz styles that have
“strayed” too far from the center of standard jazz forms.27 Others argue that
jazz as a coherent trend and even as a definition was out of date by the 1980s,
commenting that jazz is not a technique but an attitude, thus elevating hip
”28
hop as the “new jazz.
Every decade of jazz seems a restless age. Originally an expression of
African-American culture, it has proven to be a compelling art form and
an expressive mode for many people and cultures around the world. It is
by nature innovative, always moving and changing. Its many dance variations
range from one with an intimate interrelationship between sound and
movement to a “feeling the music” approach resulting in an expressive, emotive,
and playful display. Some characteristics of jazz expression do seem
contradictory, as many of the essences are incongruous, paradoxical, and
diverse. But this makes the history of jazz interesting. In the history of jazz
expression, many of the characteristics seem to build on the past while some
movements seem like sharp, left-hand turns unrelated to the historical continuum.
Born of a fusion, jazz is sophisticated and earthy, high flying and low
to the ground. Jazz is of the blues and swing, funk and pop, and a whole lot
of rhythm. It is alive and in motion around the world.
Notes
1. David Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 146–76; Eric
Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002),
287–334.
2. Porter, What Is This Thing, 113, 125.
3. Tim Lawrence, “Beyond the Hustle: 1970s Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture, and
the Emergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham,
Shake, ed. Julie Malnig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 203.
4. Halifu Osumare, “The Dance Archaeology of Rennie Harris: Hip-Hop or Postmodern?”
in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake, 263.
5. Yvonne Daniel, “Cuban Dance: An Orchard of Caribbean Creativity,” in Caribbean
Dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity, ed. Susanna Sloat (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2002), 41; Brenda Dixon Gottschild, “Crossroads, Continuities
and Contradictions: Afro-Euro-Caribbean Triangle,” in Caribbean Dance from Abakuá to
Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity, ed. Susanna Sloat (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2002), 4; Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African-American
Dance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 18. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash
Jazz Dance from 1970 into the Twenty-First Century · 67
of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House,
1983), 11–13. We build on the work of these authors who discuss African retentions and the
mystic coolness (itutu) of Yoruba and Kongo/Angola traditions and their influence in the
Americas. This “cool face” (tu l’oju) and performance attitude combines vitality with composure.
This aesthetic references a continuum of West African dance practices throughout
the Americas including jazz dance. The attitude on the early funk, soul, and hip-hop social
dance floor, all a continuum of jazz dance, is often referred to in the vernacular or colloquial
language as “getting down,” “turning it out,” or “layin’ it down.” This describes a movement
stance that references West African stylizations with a costume that is purposely dapper
and “smart.”
6. Mr. Wiggles (Steffan Clemente), second-generation B-Boy member of Rock Steady
Crew (RSC) and The Electric Boogaloos, informal lecture, September 2011 at Pulse Studios
in Calgary, Alberta; Ken Swift, recognized pioneer and original member of RSC, telephone
interview, October 2007.
7. David García, “Embodying Music/Disciplining Dance: The Mambo Body in Havana
and New York City,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake, 170; Tim Wall, “Rocking
Around the Clock,” In Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake, 187; Juliet McMains, “Dancing
Latin/Latin Dancing: Salsa and DanceSport,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake,
317–18.
8. Daniel, “Cuban Dance: An Orchard,” 45.
9. Jill Flanders Crosby, “Will the Real Jazz Dance Please Stand Up? A Critical Examination
of the Roots and Essence of Jazz with Implications for Education” (EdD diss., Teachers
College, Columbia University, 1995), 135.
10. Katherine Kramer, “The Resurgence of Tap” (master’s thesis, Wesleyan University,
1994), 21.
11. http://depts.washington.edu/uwdance/cdc/archive/repertoire.php?t=chor&id=41.
12. Heather Cornell conversation with Jill Flanders Crosby, 1997, New York City.
13. See www.diannemcintyre.com.
14. See www.swingsistah.com/index.php?id=21; www.traditionintap.org/Faculty/Mickey
_Davidson/index.html.
15. Alan Davage interviews, November 2011 and February 2012.
16. Ibid.
17. Jo Jo’s Dance Factory, created and co-directed by Jo Jo Smith and Sue Samuels in the
1960s, became the popular New York City dance school Broadway Dance Center in 1984.
18. Michèle Moss field notes, 1981; Sue Samuels e-mail, May 14, 2012.
19. Vicki Willis interview, October/November 2011.
20. Ibid.
21. Billy Siegenfeld e-mail, April, 2012.
22. Kathi Sundstrom e-mail, March, 2012.
23. http://www.decidedlyjazz.com/discover/the-company/vision.
24. http://www.rivernorthchicago.com/about.asp
25. http://www.jazzdanceworldcongress.org/index.php?tray=content&catalogID=134.
26. Lindsay Guarino e-mail, May 4, 2012.
27. Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York:
St. Martin’s Griffin Press, 1996), 149.
28. Ibid.
68 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss
Historical Movement Chart
Tom Ralabate
Following are lists of jazz walks, steps, and jazz movements in a historical
context. These lists and terms are divided into specific eras and are specific
to American culture. Each heading also contains musical styles that were
dominant during that era. Familiarity with these terms allows for practical
and technical application; understanding the time, place, and character of
these jazz vernacular terms will enhance creative interpretation. This list is
by no means complete and will continually acquire new additions. Many
movements overlap into other eras, giving truth to such statements as: “jazz
is ever changing,” “jazz dance redefines and reinvents itself,” and “everything
old is new again.”
1800s–1920s Folk, Spirituals, Brass Band, Blues, Ragtime, Dixie
Black Bottom Cross Over Grind
Boogie Eagle Rock Hornpipe
Buck and Wing Eating Cherries Itch
Bullfrog Hop Essence Jazz & Flash Steps
Buzz Falling Off the Log Jazzbo Glide
Buzzard Lope Fox Trot Jig
Cagney Freeze Jump Back Jack
Cakewalk French Twist Jumping Jim Crow
Castle Walk Gaze the Fog Killing Time
Charleston Get It On Knee Jazz
Clog Grapevine Legomania
Let It Roll Rubberlegs Tack Annie
Lindy—Syncopated Box Sand Tango
Mess Around Scare Crow Texas Tommy
Mooche Scissors Trenches
Off to Buffalo Shim Sham Turkey Trot
Over the Top Shimmy Varsity Drag
Patting Juba Shuffle Virginia
Pecking Snake Hips Walk the Dog
Picking Cherries Soft-Shoe Waltz Clog
Pivot Spank the Baby Wings
Polka Strut
Ring Shout Sugars
1930s Boogie-Woogie, Big Bands, Swing, Blues, Jazz
Andrews Sisters, Shimmy Frankenstein Sugars
Around the World
Boogie-Woogie
Camel Walk
Crazy Legs
Flea Hop
Hinge Walk Suzie Q
Jitterbug Swing
Jive Walk Texas Tommy
Kimbo Trucking Lindy
Flick Kicks with ball change Shorty George
1940s Big Band, Bebop, Afro-Cuban, Latin Invasion
Boogie-Woogie movements continued
Calypso, Cuban
Conga
Merengue (Latin Social Dance Forms)
Samba
1950s Rhythm and Blues, Rock and Roll, Cool Jazz, Hard Bop
Bunny Hop Locomotion
Cha Cha Mambo
Fly Stroll
Jitterbug West Side Story Influence
1960s British Invasion, Brazilian Invasion, Soul, Motown
Alligator Dolphin (late 1960s) Frug
Boogaloo Four Corners Hand Jive
Bossa Nova Freddy Hully Gully
70 · Tom Ralabate
Jerk Shimmy Variations Twist
Mashed Potato (Swim, Shotgun, Hitchhike) Underdog
Monkey Temptation Walk Watusi
Pony Tighten Up
1970s Popularized Music, Computerized, Salsa, Reggae, Fusion
Break-Dancing Hustle (Latin Hustle)
Disco Walk Line Dances (Bus Stop)
Funk Movement Saturday Night Fever Influence
1980s Music Videos, Rap, Punk, Rhythm & Blues, Country and Western
Note: From the 1980s through today there is an overlap
Aerobic Dancing
Break-Dancing
(Beat Box Influence)
Hip-hop
Lambada
Lyrical Jazz
Michael Jackson Influence
Moon Walk
MTV Dancing
New Wave Movement
Punk Dancing
Rap
1990s–2000s Techno, Alternative, Hip-hop, Rap, Jazz Mix, Acid Jazz,
Rave Trance, Rhythm & Blues, Country and Western
Alfa
A-Town Stomp
Boogaloo
Buddy
Butterfly
Chicken Noodle Soup
Corkscrew
Country Western Dances
Cupid Shuffle
Dime Stopping (Uncle Sam)
Electric Slide
Fila
Hammer Time
Harlem Shake
Hip-hop Bounce Walk
Humpty Hump
Lambada (Dirty Dancing)
Leo Walk
Line Dances
Macarena
Monastery
Music Video Influences
Pacing/Tagging
Patty Duke
Paula Abdul Influence
Rave Dancing
Robo Walk
Roger Rabbit
Running Man
Scooby Doo
Scootbot/Scoobop
Soulja Boy
Steve Martin
Ticking
Trance Dancing
Vogue
Waddle
Walk It Out
Which-a-ways
