Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance offers
a new look at the complex intersections between jazz music and
popular dance over the last hundred-plus years. Author Christi Jay
Wells shows how popular entertainment and cultures of social
dancing were crucial to jazz music's formation and development even
as jazz music came to earn a reputation as a "legitimate" art form
better suited for still, seated listening. Through the concept of
choreographies of listening, the book explores amateur and
professional jazz dancers' relationships with jazz music and
musicians as jazz's soundscapes and choreoscapes were forged
through close contact and mutual creative exchange. It also unpacks
the aesthetic and political negotiations through which jazz music
supposedly distanced itself from dancing bodies. Fusing
little-discussed material from diverse historical and contemporary
sources with the author's own years of experience as a social jazz
dancer, it advances participatory dance and embodied practice as
central topics of analysis in jazz studies. As it explores the
fascinating history of jazz as popular dance music, it exposes how
American anxieties about bodies and a broad cultural privileging of
the cerebral over the corporeal have shaped efforts to "elevate"
expressive forms such as jazz to elite status.
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