ABSTRACT
‘The jazz is a dance’, from Charleston to jitterbug, in which the dancers are lithe, hip youngsters fully competent in the latest jive moves, or formally dressed urban sophisticates in a nightclub or restaurant. Jazz was for dancing, but dancing and its venues were implicated in complex and heterogeneous contemporary dynamics. What this example of diasporic jazz and dance confirms is the importance of engaging with local practices and cultures if we want to build a working model of the full history of jazz as the template for modern music and its international migrations and coming-into-being. Given the ubiquity and durability of the jazz/dance connection, a case such as this is a reminder of how dangerous it is to generalise from essentialised categories. Bohlman and Plastino recognise that the jazz ‘scene is not just an abstract space; rather, it assumes its identity through the physical places of jazz, around and on the body.
