ABSTRACT
Philosophers tend to analyze music as a set of sounds, or an abstract recipe for directing those sounds, or the performance of those sounds, or recorded instances of performances. For a long stretch of its history, the popularity of jazz was intimately connected with social dancing for which much of the music was created, and with the places in which dancing happened. Beginning with the 1920s there were a plethora of jazz clubs, cabarets and ballrooms, small and large, in which dancing took place. However, any telling of dancing to jazz would do well to focus on the Savoy Ballroom – the Harlem dance emporium that featured some of the best jazz bands in the country. Jazz was dance music with a beat. Dancing may not be definitional of jazz in the strict sense of being one element in a list of necessary and sufficient conditions.
