Jazz dance thing

Dance is not a popular subject for jazz scholars. Writing in the Grove Dictionary of Music, Howard Spring suggests that one reason is because they can’t dance, and in my case he’s pretty accurate! Growing up in South London during the jazz dance boom, although I was too young to participate I became aware of the commercial side of the movement with bands such as Jamiroquai and The Brand New Heavies. Returning to London around the Millennium, I joined a new band playing rare groove that in the hands of Gilles Petersen and others had rejuvenated clubland, and to an extent the jazz scene too.

Meanwhile, in my academic life I was researching the very earliest appearances of jazz in Britain. Even before the First World War the word was fairly widely understood – but often appearing as a verb - ‘to jazz’ - meaning ‘to dance’. Preoccupied with the public response to jazz in the 1920s, I scoured contemporary accounts, reminiscences and police files finding evidence for ‘jazzing’ all over the capital and beyond, which resonated with the resurgence of jazz dance in more recent times.

As I pondered developing jazz dance as an aspect of my work on the BBJ project, ‘Beyond the Ballroom: A celebration of UK Jazz Dance’ - part of the Barbican’s Blaze festival - was irresistible. So it was that I turned up at a club under the railway arches a stone’s throw from the trendy ‘hangs’ of Hoxton Square in London in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. The timing of the event was traditional for the genre - the ‘chill’ after Saturday night excesses - but a stall selling Swifty memorabilia and a book on the jazz dance scene by DJ Snowboy from the publisher of the iconic ‘Straight No Chaser’ magazine belie the passage of time - this is now a scene with a history, extremely significant to our study of BBJ.

I join the crowd in a bamboo-planted yard with bright painted murals to listen to the Afro-Cuban group Dilanga. A little later a crowd begins to gather in the dark, exposed brick main room for Snowboy’s set. Dancers, mostly black and male, many impeccably dressed in spats, waistcoats and ties, greet each other warmly, unable to resist trying out the dance floor especially laid on top of the industrial concrete for the event. There’s music in the background – some bop, some Latin, and everyone is literally finding their feet. Suddenly the volume increases and the set begins, the dancers increasing steadily in number and in the complexity of their movement – virtuosic sometimes to the point of acrobatic, but always undeniably stylish.

A pause and Snowboy announces Dick Jewell’s film ‘The Jazz Room’ – people pack onto the dance floor and turn to watch footage from The Electric Ballroom in the 1980s. As Jewell built up the film on successive nights, he showed his ‘work in progress’ to the dancers in the club. Now twenty years later some of the same dancers watch themselves for the first time since those days - there is laughter at some outdated moves and fashion, and applause at some exceptional sequences of steps. The film finishes, the dancers return to the floor, and the beat goes on … .

Catherine Tackley