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Book Cover
E-book
Author Wells, Christi Jay, author.

Title Between beats : the jazz tradition and black vernacular dance / Christi Jay Wells
Published New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021]
©2021

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Description 1 online resource (xviii, 254 pages) : illustrations
Contents Jazz Music and its Choreographies of Listening -- "Its Bite and Its Feeling" : The Quadroon Ball and Jazz's New Orleans Plaçage Complex -- "Lindy Hopper's Delight" : The Chick Webb Orchestra and the Fluid Labor of Whitey's Lindy Hoppers -- "Counter-Bopaganda" and "Torn Riffs" : Bebop as Popular Dance Music -- "A Fine Art in Danger" : Marshall Stearns's Jazz Dance Advocacy -- Dancing Every Note : Community Theater and Kinetic Memory at Jazz 966
Summary "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"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed September 24, 2021)
Subject Jazz -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Jazz dance.
Music and dance -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Jazz dance
Jazz -- Social aspects
Music and dance
United States
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2020038890
ISBN 9780197559291
0197559298
9780197559314
019755931X
9780197559307
0197559301