Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches

7. Jazz Dance from Emancipation to 1970

7 Jazz Dance from Emancipation to 1970 Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss The history of jazz dance is intimately tied to the history of jazz music. Collectively , as jazz expression with common histories and shared aesthetic characteristics, their entwined history from emancipation to the 1970s is complex. Their parallel histories reveal a multiplicity of aesthetic approaches, interactions, and a fluidity of cultural, musical, and dance identities.1 Imagine the jazz tree as it appears in the introduction surrounded by a community dancing socially and performatively. The groove that the participants, dancers, and musicians share is one that celebrates individual expression yet moves as a collective. There is a give and take, shift and change in aesthetic intention that honors the roots of the tree, celebrating the heritage and legacy of jazz while new branches form as a result of new innovations. These innovations reveal a history of jazz expression where the essence of jazz is one of experimentation and discovery,2 embracing and absorbing various influences while holding individualistic expression and freedom in high regard . Thus jazz history is a landscape of evolving meanings, values, ideas, sounds, movements, contestations, contradictions, pluralities, and multiple constructions of “what is jazz.”3 In this chapter, the historical discussion of jazz and its West African roots is framed by an examination of relevant jazz dance and music history literature as well as oral history interviews. This discussion and analysis offers a broad historical overview intended to introduce the sweep of jazz dance and music history. 45 Setting the Stage “Jazz is a physical and aural expression of the complexity and exuberance of American culture and history.”4 Jazz dance and music emerged primarily from what is known as African-American folk and vernacular5 music and dance, lending creative inspiration to each other’s development.6 These early dances incorporated improvisation and reflected “the power of the community supporting the individual creative voice in a non-literal expression of storytelling and connection to the human experience.”7 A competitive spirit often imbued these early forms, and movements were characterized by a weighted release into gravity, a dynamic spine, propulsive rhythms, and a rhythmic, conversational approach to musical accompaniment.8 From the 1850s into the twentieth century, presentational performance opportunities and venues for African-American musicians and dancers increased and dance troupes such as the Whitman Sisters (1900–1943) became incubators of dancing talent.9 In medicine shows, tent shows, minstrelsy, vaudeville, gillies,10 and eventually the musical theater stage, movement details of African-American folk and vernacular dances were reemerging in new dances, or in dances once seen only on plantations, retaining their original form while expanding through movement invention.11 The Cakewalk, performed to the syncopated rhythms of the emerging ragtime music in the 1890s, was one of the earlier dances that served as an incubator for inventive new steps.12 In July 1898, Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk opened on Broadway featuring the Cakewalk performed to ragtime music.13 Varied dance and music practices were also meeting each other in the cultural diversity of America where new ideas were explored. For example, William Henry Lane, known as Master Juba, lived in the Five Points district of New York City where Irish immigrants and African-Americans lived in the mid-1800s. He enlivened the rhythmic structure of the Irish jig with shuffle and African rhythms, adding the element of swing to his dancing.14 Sand dances and early tap dances followed, where the dancer used sand on the floor and metal implements on shoes to create musical sounds and rhythms. Dances retained African-like movements and propulsive rhythms while assimilating the solo style of white dancers.15 African-American vernacular dance became more syncopated, heading toward the swinging dance forms such as the Charleston and Lindy, which would be called early jazz dance. Musically, in the mid- to late 1800s, two evolutions were occurring that are considered the direct precursors of jazz: the blues and ragtime. The blues 46 · Jill Flanders Crosby and Michèle Moss used devices such as blue notes (notes said to fall “somewhere between the cracks of the piano”), slurring, growls, call-and-response, and a loosening of the rhythmic structure of the melody line from direct correspondence with the basic downbeat, the strongest beat felt inside a musical bar. Ragtime began to deliberately throw syncopations against downbeats as a kind of counterpoint in...