Jazz, Dance and Black British Identities 1

Robert Crease ² has asserted unequivocally that ‘Dance is an integral and indispensible part of jazz studies’, yet its practices and meanings have rarely been given the attention they deserve. This may be because the manifestations of jazz as dance music highlight its popular status when, as I have argued previously, a ‘high art’ reading of the music is more compatible with conventional scholarly activity and has ensured that jazz has become a valid subject for study at educational institutions’. ³ Howard Spring, in the ‘Dance’ entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, has also suggested that ‘it may simply be that jazz scholars don’t usually dance’. ⁴ This lack of physical and therefore cerebral engagement with dance is regrettable, but perhaps not surprising given that the development of jazz criticism and scholarship has been intimately linked with the evolution of listening over dancing (not that the two are mutually exclusive) as the primary mode of reception. Perhaps there is an underlying feeling that the spectacle of dance (social or staged) is a distraction and incompatible with the ideal conditions for listening which might be considered necessary when the music is the primary focus of attention. Contemporaneously, the technological development of sound recording has provided a canon of jazz masterworks founded on the disembodied representation of performance. Recently, however, the dominance of this canon has been questioned, prompting consideration of previously excluded aspects of jazz. ⁵ At the most extreme, this scholarship involves musicians whose performances have not been made widely available on record, or in some instances not documented at all, often as a result of their race or gender. ⁶ Exclusion also extends to others who are involved in jazz performances but may not be represented sonically even on ‘live’ recordings such as the audience or, indeed, dancers.