Between Beats

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.

"The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance explores the complex intersections between jazz music and popular dance over the last hundred-plus years. It aims to show how popular entertainment and cultures of social dancing were crucial to jazz music's formation and development, but it also investigates the processes through which 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. The book's later chapters also critically unpack the aesthetic and political negotiations through which jazz music supposedly distanced itself from dancing bodies. As musicians and critics sought to secure institutional space for jazz within America's body-averse academic and high-art cultures, an intentional severance from the dancing body proved crucial to jazz's re-positioning as a form of autonomous, elite art. Fusing little-discussed material from diverse historical and contemporary sources with the author's own years of experience as a social jazz dancer, this book seeks to advance participatory dance and embodied practice as central topics of analysis in jazz studies. As it tells the rich, untold story of jazz as popular dance music, this book also 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"--

"Finally! A compelling account of the movements of jazz across bodies and social circumstances. Crafted with care, and brimming with original archival research, Between Beats demonstrates how social dance operates at the center of concerns including commerce, race, class, white supremacy, nostalgia,
and gender. Wells offers an urgent and entirely necessary affirmation of jazz along its unmistakable music-dance continuum." -- Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and Professor of Dance, Duke University

"This creative and inspiring book rethinks jazz history through the collective consciousness of Black vernacular dance. If today jazz is 'America's classical music, ' it pushed its way into concert and lecture halls by being distanced from the dance cultures that birthed it. With this remarkable
study, Christi Jay Wells gives 'body' to jazz studies through a stunning and accessible critique of jazz historiography, scholarly omissions, and racial ideologies. When the music starts, Between Beats asks jazz studies, 'shall we dance?'" -- Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Pianist, Composer, and Music
Historian, and Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania