BETWEEN BEATS

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 book represents a massive effort of commitment and research and deserves to find those readers who will appreciate it." -- Graham Colombé, Jazz Journal "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 "The text richly evokes music and dance in very specific places and times, but common folkways wind their ways through migration, segregation, and integration, both buffeted and nurtured by institutions and industrial structures from Roaring Twenties dance halls to classic Hollywood, to a neighborhood senior center around the turn of the millennium. That Wells juggles that complexity with grace and wit results in a book that is intellectually rewarding and historically evocative, and that makes you want to get up and dance." -- Robynn J. Stilwell, Journal of the Society for American Music Christi Jay Wells is assistant professor of musicology at Arizona State University's School of Music, Dance, and Theatre and affiliate faculty with ASU's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. They have also been an active practitioner of social blues and jazz dancing for nearly two decades and have given numerous dance workshops and dance history lectures locally, nationally, and internationally. Their research on jazz music in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s has received the Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award and Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music.