“Youcan't Dance to It”: Jazz Music and Its Choreographies of Listening

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“You Can’t Dance to It”: Jazz Music and Its Choreographies of Listening

Christopher J. Wells

Abstract: Central to dominant jazz history narratives is a midcentury rupture where jazz transitions Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 from popular dance music to art music. Fundamental to this trope is the idea that faster tempos and complex melodies made the music hostile to dancing bodies. However, this constructed moment of rupture masks a longer, messier process of negotiation among musicians, audiences, and institutions that restructured listening behavior within jazz spaces. Drawing from the field of dance studies, I offer the concept of “choreographies of listening” to interrogate jazz’s range of socially enforced movement “scores” for audience listening practices and their ideological significance. I illustrate this concept through two case studies: hybridized dance/concert performances in the late 1930s and “off-time” bebop social dancing in the 1940s and 1950s. These case studies demonstrate that both seated and dancing listening were rhetorically significant modes of engagement with jazz music and each expressed agency within an emergent Afromodernist sensibility.

Like many jazz scholars, I spend a lot of time doing critical historiography, contemplating the sed- imental layers of ideology jazz’s histories have ac- cumulated over time and how those striations af- fect our view of the past. But there is one moment in my life that sticks out when I truly felt the gravity of jazz historical narratives. When I say gravity, I mean precisely that: it pulled me off my feet and planted my ass in a chair. At the 2013 American Musicologi- christopher j. wells is As- cal Society annual meeting in Pittsburgh, a live band sistant Professor of Musicology performed Ted Buehrer’s painstaking transcriptions at the Arizona State University of Mary Lou Williams’s compositions and arrange- School of Music. Their work ap- ments. My friend Anna and I lindy hopped our way pears in the Oxford Handbook of through Williams’s best charts from the 1920s and Dance and Ethnicity (2016) and 1930s: “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” “Messa Stomp,” the journals Women & Music and 1 Jazz & Culture. They are current- and “Mary’s Idea.” About halfway through, the ly writing a book about the his- band took up “Scorpio” from Williams’s Zodiac tory of jazz music’s ever-shifting Suite, and I felt that groovy bassline throughout relationship with popular dance. my legs and hips as delightful pockets of rhythmic

36 dissonance invited me (and I presume also Great jazz soloists abandoned dreams of Christopher J. Anna, though I haven’t asked her) to keep having big bands of their own, formed Wells dancing . . . but we didn’t. The music still small groups instead and retreated to felt “danceable,” but we’d crossed from nightclubs, places too small for dancing. 1938 to 1944, and I felt a shift inside myself . . . The jam session had become the model, as I questioned whether letting my hips freewheeling, competitive, demanding, the respond to that bassline would still be ap- kind jazz musicians had always played to propriate as the band crossed the “bebop entertain themselves after the squares had moment”: that early 1940s boundary sep- gone home. The Swing Era was over; jazz arating jazz-as-pop from jazz-as-art. had moved on. And here and there across

The bebop moment has become a cru- the country, in small clubs and on obscure Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 cial, arguably the crucial, event in near- record labels, the new and risk-filled mu- ly every large-scale narrative treatment sic was finally beginning to be heard. It was of jazz’s history. As cultural theorist Ber- called “Bebop.”3 nard Gendron explains, The bebop revolution has since been en- Henry Martin and Keith Waters offer a shrined in the jazz canon as a contest of similar framing in their ubiquitous tome epic proportions, occurring at the ma- Jazz: The First Hundred Years: “The bebop- jor fault line of jazz history. Bebop is giv- pers, however, disassociated jazz from the en credit for having transformed jazz from jitterbugging crowds of the 1930s in an at- a popular dance music, firmly ensconced tempt to win respect for their music as an art form. The radical change in tempo in the Hit Parade, to a demanding, experi- 4 mental art music consigned to small clubs also certainly affected dancing.” Among and sophisticated audiences.2 the “key points” they use to differenti- ate bebop from swing are the following: Gendron’s historiographic framing is “Deemphasis on dancing: Tempos con- quite astute, and it is important we con- siderably faster or slower than in swing; tinue to reexamine this still potent nar- Rhythmic pulse less obviously articulat- rative construct. I would advocate moved than in swing.”5 Further scholarly ac- ing away from the idea of a bifurcating counts bolster this point. Even as he no- “moment” in favor of conceptualizing tably, and somewhat controversially, sit- the cultural transition of jazz at midcen- uates bebop as a contiguous extension of tury as a long and often messy process en- the swing era, historian David Stowe still compassing many individual and collec- reinscribes this trope, offering “big bands tive negotiations among musicians, audi- betraying their audience by playing un- ences, and institutions. danceable tempos or lacing their charts A critical element of the potent trope with the controversial modernisms of Gendron highlights is that the bebop mo- what was coming to be called bebop.”6 ment marked jazz music’s severance from Stowe’s emphasis on betrayal highlights practices of social dancing. This is encap- another significant element of this narra- sulated in a scene from Ken Burns’s iconic, tive: that musicians claimed greater au- if oft-criticized, documentary Jazz: “No tonomy as artists by distancing them- Dancing, Please.” The sign fills the screen selves from popular audiences and from before panning upward to a sax player the trappings of mass entertainment. blowing in a smoky club. In this early mo- Musicians and dancers have also re ment from the eighth volume of Jazz, nar- affirmed this narrative. In his autobiogra- rator Keith David explains, phy, Dizzy Gillespie attributes his band’s

148 (2) Spring 2019 37 “You Can’t struggles in the late 1940s to a disjuncture of serious art. As he explains, concert for- Dance to It” between what his band was playing and mats present a powerful cultural rheto- what social dancers wanted. ric within the United States, because of Dancers had to hear those four solid beats their associations with the “consider- able social privilege” afforded European and could care less about the more esoteric 10 aspects, the beautiful advanced harmonies art music. Concerts, of course, also im- and rhythms that we played and our vir- pose a specific choreography for audienc- tuosity, as long as they could dance. They es; DeVeaux writes, “The concert is a sol- didn’t care whether we played a flatted fifth emn ritual with music the object of rev- or a ruptured 129th.7 erent contemplation. Certain formalities are imposed upon the concert audience: Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Foregrounding and problematizing au- people attend in formal dress, sit quietly, dience members’ bodies, Gillespie high- and attentively with little outward bodily lights the chasm between his own expres- movement, and restrict their response to sive desires and those of listeners who applause at appropriate moments only.”11 principally wanted “to dance close and In a concert setting, musicians and seat- screw.”8 Frankie Manning, arguably the ed audience members lay claim to cultur- most influential Savoy Ballroom danc- al capital by performing the movements er of the swing era, gives an account of and nonmovements that mark the con- bebop from which one would certain- cert as an elite social space and the music ly gather the music was not for dancing. performed as worthy of serious consid- Manning writes: “I went to Minton’s eration. Both affirmations and contesta- Playhouse to hear some jazz, and I said, tions of the bebop moment as a singular ‘What the heck is going on?’ . . . I was point of rupture that marks jazz’s emer- used to music for dancing, but this new gence as “art” necessarily position jazz sound was only for listening.”9 Though listeners’ bodies as critical sites of deep- Manning’s parsing of listening and danc- ly political performance both within and ing highlights the very dichotomization in opposition to social inscribed chore- of listener corporealities I seek to disrupt ographies. in this essay, his experience represents his I contend that jazz studies as a field generation’s perspective regarding the could benefit from more robust discus- challenges bebop’s innovations present- sions of its audiences and of the social and ed to bodies entrained to the rhythms and aesthetic politics that shape how listen- tempos of swing, challenges that indeed ing bodies contribute to the aesthetic dis- dissuaded them from dancing. courses that mark jazz as lowbrow, high- Of course, as audiences stop dancing, brow, sinful, tasteful, primitive, modern, they necessarily start doing something popular entertainment, and high art in else, and equally critical to jazz’s osten- various times and places. As both a prac- sible transition is listeners’ new mode ticing social jazz dancer and a scholar re- of performative engagement, as jazz au- searching jazz music’s intersections with diences increasingly listened while per- social and popular dance, I have had the forming the motionless, serious, and in- privilege of engaging substantively with tellectually rigorous listening posture of dance studies as a field. Dance scholars the Western concert listener. Musicol- have developed a robust and deeply nu- ogist Scott DeVeaux argues that the rise anced critical discussion of bodies and of the jazz concert between 1935 and 1945 embodied expression that could certain- was crucial to repositioning jazz as a form ly inform work in jazz studies, even when

38 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences dance is not our explicit subject. In this es- Auditorium, the first of which, also in Christopher J. say, I offer the concept of choreographies of 1938, featured Cab Calloway’s band. Ad- Wells listening as a theoretical tool meant both vertisements made clear that from 9–10 to place jazz studies in closer dialogue p.m. there would be “NO DANCING, in with valuable work on embodiment and order that you may hear Cab at ease” with performance emerging from the field of assurances that “at ten o’clock sharp, dance studies and to offer us useful lan- he will get ‘hotcha’ and ‘jam it’ until guage through which to more critically one-thirty o’clock the next in the morn- interrogate the complex and deeply con- ing.”13 The following year, City Auditori- textual social performances of listening um hosted Count Basie’s orchestra, offer- in which jazz’s audiences engage. Toward ing a concert half-hour with “POSITIVELY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 that end, I develop and apply the concept NO DANCING” following a patron’s in- through two brief case studies, one from terview in the lobby.14 the early 1930s and one from the late 1940s To understand why these Atlanta con- and early 1950s, that highlight shifts and certs were exceptional, however, and why unorthodoxies in black listener corpore- these audiences may have desired to en- ality and complicate dominant narratives act the seated posture of serious listen- regarding black audiences’ corporeal ing, we must consider that these perfor- modes of dancing and of listening during mances were organized as racially seg- these periods. regated events for black audiences only. The same Daily World article announc- Black jazz audiences during the inter- ing Cab Calloway’s 1938 appearance and war period were particularly mindful of its “streamlined” concert section also the intersection between seated listen- reveals that this would be City Audito- ing and the projection of rigor and digni- rium’s first “all colored double perfor- ty. A series of events targeting black au- mance” and that “management is ea- diences in Atlanta during the late 1930s ger to see if Negro people really appreci- specifically bifurcated the space for seat- ate an evening all their own.”15 While it ed listening and dancing listening. Ad- may have been their first jazz concert, the vertisements in the Chicago Defender and black Atlantans attending City Auditori- the Atlanta Daily World–Atlanta’s prima- um were not strangers to the role of at- ry African American newspaper–pro- tentive audience member for a serious moted dance parties that also featured a concert performance. The venue regu- separate “concert hour” when no danc- larly hosted not only jazz dances but also ing was allowed. The first such concert graduation ceremonies, community pag- was held at Sunset Park in July 1938 and eants, and operatic and concert recital featured the Jimmie Lunceford Orches- performances by black singers, the kinds tra. The Defender reported that the Lunce of events whose concordances with elite ford event separated dancing time from European culture musicologist Lawrence concert time: “During the concert hour Schenbeck has convincingly situated before the ‘jam session,’ Lunceford en- within the African American social and tertained the crowd with what could be intellectual project of racial uplift.16 In considered a floor show, but was styled fact, earlier that month, the City Audito- as a concert hour–no dancing was al- rium staged a pageant entitled “75 Years lowed. At 9:30 o’clock, swing-time be- of Progress” that celebrated the develop- gun continuing until 1:30 o’clock.”12 Two ment of the Negro race in America, and similar events were held at Atlanta’s City earlier in the year the auditorium hosted

148 (2) Spring 2019 39 “You Can’t Figure 1 Dance to It” Cab Calloway Band Concert Advertisement, 1938 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

Source: Atlanta Daily World, August 4, 1938 (accessed via ProQuest Historical Newspapers).

Figure 2 Count Basie Orchestra Concert Advertisement, 1939

Source: Atlanta Daily World, May 14, 1939 (accessed via ProQuest Historical Newspapers).

40 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences spiritual concerts from the Tuskeegee ences listening, it is useful to consider the Christopher J. University Choir under the direction of conjuncturally specific listening praxis Wells African American composer William ethnomusicologist Judith Becker has Dawson.17 Atlanta’s black audiences thus termed “habitus of listening.” Building already understood the specific rules gov- upon sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s frame- erning audiences’ corporeal performance work, Becker offers this term as a way to in this elite cultural space: by sitting understand the default mode(s) of listen- down, listening intently, and responding ing within a particular sphere of musical appropriately with limited movement, practice. As Becker explains: black audiences could acquire embodied Our habitus of listening is tacit, unexam- cultural capital by performing the phys- ined, seemingly completely “natural.” We Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 ical rhetoric through which seated audi- listen in a particular way without think- ences communicate respect, dignity, in- ing about it, and without realizing that it telligence, and sophistication. even is a particular way of listening. Most I introduce these hybridized concert of our styles of listening have been learned events, which explicitly instruct audi- through unconscious imitation of those ences about how to position their bod- who surround us and those with whom we ies for listening, to suggest choreography continually interact. A “habitus of listen- as a useful analytic lens through which to ing” suggests not a necessity nor a rule, but approach listening practices and engage- an inclination, a disposition to listen with ment with music, and specifically with a particular kind of focus . . . and to inter- jazz. My use of the term choreography fol- pret the meanings of the sounds and one’s lows dance scholar Susan Foster, who emotional responses to the musical event employs the concept to consider broad- in somewhat (never totally) predictable ly the structuring of possibilities for how ways.20 bodies can move and behave within a given space. Whether planned intentionally Tacit, socially constructed choreogra- by a single person or formed organically phy is often central to the process of “un- through gradual shifts in tacit social mo- conscious imitation” to which Becker re- res, choreography, she argues, is a “hypo- fers. The habitus generated by a musical thetical setting forth of what the body is space’s choreography guides how one en- and what it can be based on the decisions acts the process of listening, what senso- made in rehearsal and in performance ry information is a relevant part of this about its identity.” Foster claims we can listening process, and what constitutes thus read choreographies as “the prod- appropriate interaction between the vari- uct of choices, inherited, invented, or se- ous participants. When applied to jazz lis- lected, about what kinds of bodies and tening spaces, choreography indexes the subjects are being constructed and what implicit and explicit assumptions peo- kinds of arguments about these bodies ple make about their role (dancer, musi- and subjects are being put forth.”18 Fos- cian, concertgoer, and so on), how they ter’s work draws from a robust interdis- should thus orient their body to commu- ciplinary conversation in dance studies nicate what it means for them to listen to that regards the body, whether moving or the music being played (or that they are stationary, as always performative and al- playing), and what their listening bodies ways political.19 communicate about the soundscapes and To see how movement’s interaction attendant values within a given shared with choreographies specifically influ- space.

148 (2) Spring 2019 41 “You Can’t In discussing jazz musicians in the talent as the result of a savage and natu- Dance to It” 1920s, musicologist Jeffrey Magee sit- rally gifted body rather than a rigorously uates jazz musicians’ enactment of ra- cultivated mind. cial uplift as a form of cultural mastery For black musicians and audiences, as- that demonstrated fluency in Western pirational desire for the cultural capi- concert traditions.21 By corporeally en- tal afforded serious music and musician- acting the role of Western concert lis- ship functioned at the point of intersec- teners, black audiences at City Audito- tion between two ideological formations rium also embodied an ethic of racial up- in African American communities: the lift through cultural mastery, situating aforementioned racial uplift and, in the

themselves as educated, cerebral, and se- 1940s, an emergent discourse of Afro- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 rious listeners. Crucially, performing the modernism. Musicologist and pianist nonmovement of a seated listener also Guthrie Ramsey has situated Afromod- signaled that African American audienc- ernism as an aesthetic and political con- es were capable of corporeal discipline, a sciousness through which Afrodiasporic critical counter-statement to longstand- people asserted artistic agency and au- ing minstrel tropes that portrayed black tonomy by focusing on form and ab- bodies as fundamentally wild and sub- straction over function. For some musi- human. Corporeal discipline was thus cians, this aesthetic sparked an ambiva- central on numerous levels to the physi- lence or even hostility toward dancing. cal enactment of racial uplift.22 Control From their perspective, listening with- of one’s body was tied to positive moral out silence and without stillness commu- values through the early twentieth-cen- nicated both a lack of respect and a lack tury discourse surrounding physical cul- of effort: that one was not truly listen- ture. As a precursor to the American ing. Operating from within this ideolo- bodybuilding movement, the concept of gy, accounts of jazz’s transition to a form physical culture offered that individuals of art music tend to focus principally on were capable of improving their bodies the agency and actions of jazz musicians, through educated, disciplined labor and suggesting that bebop players complicat- were capable, through this work, of im- ed jazz’s musical texture to such a degree proving their worth and moral character. that the sound itself rejected the danc- This concept became an especially po- ing body and demanded pure, seated lis- tent tool for African American communi- tening to be truly appreciated. As my sec- ties because it offered a counter-narrative ond case study will show, however, some to white supremacist genetic determin- black youth moved against the new pre- ism.23 It is also important to note that a scribed choreography of motionless lis- still, seated listening posture draws atten- tening, participating actively in bebop’s tion away from one’s body, presenting a innovations in a manner every bit as rig- space where serious sounds meet serious orous as their seated counterparts. minds (with perhaps the minor conces- sion that there are ears involved). For Af- Writing for the Hartford Courant in 1948, rican Americans at this time, emphasiz- columnist M. Oakley Stafford offered the ing their cerebral prowess and sensitive sort of frustrated antibebop rant com- intellect was a powerful tactic for contest- monplace among “moldy fig” critics in ing oppressive stereotypes that marked the 1940s. However, Stafford’s frustra- black bodies as wild, unrestrained, and tion in this case was not with the music dangerous and that sensationalized black itself but rather that in bebop’s “newest

42 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences phase,” a new form of social dance was “That’s Ridiculous!” Charles first heard Christopher J. emerging alongside it. jazz music as a child growing up on the is- Wells I’m Up To My Ears In The Bebop develop- land of St. Croix. He and his friends got ment. . . . Now the newest phase of it . . . A into bebop through listening to records few weeks ago there was only the music . . . in the early 1940s as young teenagers Sharp, discordant chords, absence of tune, and started dancing to bebop records in and that sort of thing. No one danced to it. church basements, at house parties, and, . . . Now the new development . . . They are by 1945, at massive block parties all over dancing to it. They are doing what appears New York City. These block party sites, to be a combination of the modern dance according to Charles, included in a va- with jitterbugging thrown in and even a cant lot adjacent to Minton’s Playhouse Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 step or two of ballroom stuff. . . . It is so defi- where a record player perched on a flat- nitely to current music what the modern bed truck would play tunes such as Dizzy dance was to dancing . . . Difficult to accept Gillespie’s “Emanon” or Tad Dameron’s . . . Angular . . . Meaningful . . . And slow to get “The Squirrel,” both particularly popular into your affection but once there, you love among dancers. it. . . . Watch the up-and-coming set dance Aligning with the counter-history to it differently from the way they danced Charles’s reminiscences invite, Ramsey’s to jazz. . . . It is definitely not jazz . . . Worth discussion of Afromodernism explicitly watching . . . It grows on you.24 eschews the strict bifurcation of high art and popular culture central to the white While bebop’s “undanceableness” is a modernist paradigm implicit in most central theme of its historiography, there framings of the bebop moment. Ramsey is ample evidence that counter-chore- highlights the black body’s shifting rela- ographies existed among black youth tionship with popular culture and mass who treated bebop as their popular mu- media as particularly critical to the post- sic and developed new social dance forms war emergence of Afromodernist sensi- that both reflected and added new layers bilities. to bebop’s already complex tapestry of If one of the legacies of nineteenth-century innovations. minstrelsy involved the public degradation Several major African American fig- of the black body in the American entertain- ures in jazz history have alluded to this ment sphere, then one hundred years after phenomenon. As Amiri Baraka notably minstrelsy’s emergence, African Americans wrote in Blues People, “‘You can’t dance used this same signifier to upset a racist so- to it’ was the constant harassment– cial order and to affirm in the public enter- which is, no matter the irrelevancy, a tainment and the private spheres their cul- lie. My friends and I as youths used only ture and humanity. Although it has some to emphasize the pronoun more. ‘You precedent, the new attitude was so prevalent can’t dance to it’ and whispered ‘or any- 25 that it represents a huge departure from ear- thing else for that matter.’” When I in- lier modes of “racial uplift,” especially the terviewed Sylvan Charles, an eighty- “politics of respectability” championed by one-year-old retired postal worker, Har- the black professional and upper-class citi- lem resident, and self-identified “bebop zens, who sought to discipline black bodies dancer” about his experience with bebop into bourgeois submission.26 as a teenager in the 1940s, I presented him with the common narrative that bebop In Ramsey’s analysis, Afromodernism music was not for dancing; his response: involved a resistant shift in embodied

148 (2) Spring 2019 43 “You Can’t practice–I would argue, an alternative These younger bebop dancers repre- Dance to It” choreography of listening–manifested sented a sharp generational shift in which as a corporeal shift away from the dis- the music activated young peoples’ bod- ciplined, corporeal engagement that ies even as older dancers, like Frankie marked the era of racial uplift. Indeed, Manning and his contemporaries, resist- Ramsey acknowledges the significance ed the change. In her drafts for an unfin- of social dancing in black popular culture ished manuscript, Dehn relays a vivid de- but focuses the bulk of his analysis on the scription of the attitudes of black youth lyrical and sonic signifiers presented in from a Mr. Bishop, an instructor of black popular recordings. As such, in explor- physical culture at PS 28, a Brooklyn pub-

ing black audiences’ kinetic engagement lic school. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 with bebop music through emergent The post-war kids are brighter, more ma- forms of popular dance, I seek to bolster ture, aware of problems economic, social, and expand his emphasis on black corpo- political. Conditioned to present time un- real autonomy as critical to Afromodern- rest, insecurity. They don’t think in terms ist liberation. of the future. . . . They don’t want to be dom- When asked about bebop’s “undance- inated. They are spontaneous, dynamic. I able” nature, dancer and folklorist Mura actually feel they are a better human mate- Dehn replied, “It was very, very dance- rial, conscious of their environment–good able–it was magnificent. It was not done and bad. They don’t go for Jazz. They are by white people. It was mostly done by 27 Bop fiends. If they are interested in dance, black people, and it was done in spurts.” everything else becomes secondary.29 Dehn, a Russian modern dancer, engaged in a decades-long study of African Ameri- Bishop’s account parallels cultural can folk and popular dance from the 1940s historian Eric Lott’s description of the through the 1980s. Her work plays a vital shifts in social consciousness among role in documenting a crucial yet largely young Northern black people in the mid- unacknowledged cultural space in which 1940s. Lott presents “bop style” as a de- bebop dance thrived as part of a nascent fiant identity performed through a ma- postwar black youth culture. Dehn’s ac- trix of statements not just in music, but count of bop dancing focuses on the ear- also fashion, language, and demean- ly 1950s, when a new generation of young or. Though dance is conspicuously ab- people, more cynical and politically rad- sent from Lott’s account of bop culture ical than those ten years older, regarded in New York, his description of “an aes- bebop as their popular music. The dance thetic of speed and displacement” and element of the new culture, according to a “closed hermeneutic that had the un- Dehn, lagged behind the music by about deniable effect of alienating the riff-raff half a decade. During World War II, ac- and expressing a sense of felt isolation, all cording to Dehn: the while affirming a collective purpose” neatly fit Dehn’s positioning of the cul- Musicians were ahead of dancers in their 30 search of new forms. . . . In a furious as- ture surrounding bebop dance. Further, sault of saxophone virtuosity the musician that the young black “cools” of the 1940s seems to disregard the dancer. He sweeps and 1950s found ways to move to this mu- him off the floor, breaks his legs with ir- sic is well in-line with Ramsey’s position- rational rhythms, stabs him with long ing of Afromodernism as a governing whaling spasms, paralyzes with introvert paradigm for black life and black aesthet- monotony.28 ics at midcentury.

44 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences What ultimately emerged from the Lindy. The preoccupation is to break up Christopher J. younger dancers’ experimentation was a the beat. The position of the body becomes Wells new style that adapted and expanded ear- nonchalant, deliberately negligent.35 lier vernacular forms, most notably the lindy hop and the applejack. Applejack- Through off-time dancing, bebop dancing became the most prominent style of ers worked around one of the core fea- bebop solo dance, done almost exclu- tures of bop’s ostensible undanceability sively by men, often in formal and infor- –that it was simply too fast–by effec- mal cutting contests.31 While individu- tively cutting the tempo in half at will al dance steps known as the “applejack” through their own realization of pulse. date back to the 1920s or before, apple- This sort of metric and hypermetric play Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 jacking reemerged as a solo dance craze in allowed dancers not only to keep up with the late 1940s. The applejack is a step with bebop musicians, but to move in and out many similarities to the Charleston in of time with them, analogous to the inte- which inward-pointed feet step over each gration of “inside” and “outside” playing other as the knees continuously cross. By in a bop solo. In our interview, Charles the 1950s, this basic step had yielded a also emphasized his strong preference for wide array of variations including cork- the groovy feeling of dancing off-time, screws, fans, tic-tocs, and other steps ori- and told me he had only recently been ented around shifts in toe-heel balance.32 told by jazz musicians that he was danc- Individual styles of applejacking emerged ing “half-time.” The off-time tempo cre- with varying degrees of complexity ated space for complex nuances in danc- among different scenes. Dehn’s hand- ers’ engagement with musical rhythm written movement descriptions of apple- as, in Dehn’s words, “in New York, they jackers at the Audubon Ballroom iden- also dance between the beats, forming tify a range of slides and dips as well as a rhythmic counterpoint with the mu- abrupt stops in the middle of steps, lead- sic.”36 This type of danced engagement ing her to identify the Audubon dancers’ aligns in interesting ways with Stowe’s style as “the most modern dancing I ever description of bebop musicians’ techni- saw.”33 At the Savoy Ballroom, Dehn not- cal reflection of broader sociopolitical ed, “it is danced in a broad and sweeping shifts. way, with dips and slides, with diving and The sharp contradiction of the ensem- skating, mostly to Boogie-Woogie music. ble in bebop, together with the empha- But its off-balance pendulum fits into the 34 sis on individual virtuosity and dissonant torn riffs of Bop.” (to swing-attuned ears) sonorities, sug- Applejack dancers negotiated bebop’s gests the heroic alienation of the postwar “torn riffs” and its fast tempos through individual cut loose from Depression-era a shift toward half-time, or “off-time,” modes of commitment, or the racial mil- dancing. As Dehn described the phenom- itancy taking root among African-Ameri- enon, cans in the late 1940s.37 Time is cut in two. Instead of fast bounc- ing steps there is a resilient slow stepping On a cultural level, bebop dancers are with multiple jitters on each foot. It travels clearly part of Stowe’s paradigm, yet they through the erect body to a wobbling head. also fit within it on a technical level. In It is still the basic Lindy formula, but a new both its emphasis on individualism and rhythm has emerged. A half-time off-beat its use of dissonance–understood as metric rather than harmonic–applejacking

148 (2) Spring 2019 45 “You Can’t fits neatly into a bebop aesthetic that ex- appearance alongside the hucklebuck is Dance to It” emplifies the “cultural mood of alien- instructive regarding the porous transfer ation” the music expressed.38 between bebop and other black styles of While highly intricate and technical- popular music. The popular song paired ly complex, applejacking was firmly en- with the dance was an R&B recasting of trenched in black popular culture. Black Charlie Parker’s composition “Now’s newspaper coverage of the emerging the Time” and became a significant hit phenomenon suggests that the dance be- for Paul Wilson and his Hucklebuckers came popular via stage revues featuring in 1949 (and later, of course, for Chubby the song “Applejack,” itself popularized Checker).

by Lionel Hampton in 1948 and Lucky Often walking a playful line himself be- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Millender in 1949. Dolores Calvin of the tween “serious” art and popular enter- Chicago Defender reports seeing the dance tainment, Dizzy Gillespie noted the het- for the first time both on stage and in the erogeneity in bebop audiences’ listening audience during a 1948 performance by practices. Gillespie affirmed that bebop Hampton in Newark, New Jersey. was, in fact, a “danceable” music in a 1949 The kids were jumping to “applejack” essay he penned for the Los Angeles Senti- rhythm in the aisles. . . . The ones in their nel defending his style of music through seats who couldn’t get to the aisles were what he termed “counter-bopaganda”: yelling “applejack” followed by wild, un- Another argument against bop is that peo- controllable hysterics. . . . We just sat glued ple can’t dance to it. Well, I’ve seen people to our chair, afraid to comment for fear of dancing to our band and to our rca Victor a hundred or more nearby juniors crashing recordings such as “Swedish Suite” all over our skull. . . But nevertheless amazed and the country. As a matter of fact they think shocked at the goings on. [. . .] Then Hamp the Afro Cuban rhythm affects [sic] are es- began Hamp’s Boogie. . . . That too, had “ap- pecially interesting to a dancer. But very of- plejack” steps in it which he did quite will- ten people don’t want to dance, they just ingly. . . . The singers, Wini Brown and Ro- want to come up to the bandstand and lis- land Burton were also on the “applejack ten to the music. They pay their money and kick.”39 they take their choice. Is that bad?41 The applejack was one of several be- With the caution that this column, at- bop-era dances associated in the 1940s tributed to Gillespie, may well have been principally with R&B music and specifi- written by his publicist as was common cally with a popular “jump blues” hit. An practice at the time, this passage troubles article in Our World that otherwise does two pervasive narrative tropes of bebop not discuss dance extensively featured a historiography.42 First, Gillespie seems half-page spread of a dancer engaged in to invite danced engagement with his the solo “applejack” and partnered “be- music rather than expressing any resent- bop.” As the author explained, “dig the ment toward the ostensibly frivolous ac- new dances the cats are cooking. That tivity. He offers danceability as one of the should squash the deadpans who say be- music’s merits. Second, and highly re- bop isn’t danceable.”40 Indeed, Dehn fre- lated, he enthusiastically frames a bebop quently cites the applejack, along with performance as a commercial transaction the hucklebuck, as major postwar dance in which paying audiences purchase the trends among the bebop “cools.” Though right to interact with the music however she emphasizes the applejack more, its they choose. This is not the attitude of a

46 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences heroic modernist nobly rejecting engage- as central source texts, likely skews our Christopher J. ment with the commercial marketplace framing and understanding of audience Wells nor of one promoting antagonism to- members’ modes of listening and the ward popular audiences as a path to aes- range of movements available to jazz lis- thetic liberation and ascendance to the teners in specific cultural and historical realm of high art. Here, Gillespie demon- conjunctures. What I am explicitly ask- strates that, like generations of jazz musi- ing for here is a paradigm shift in how we cians before him, he was himself far more regard rigorous listening and musical flu- comfortable with and invested in the role ency. It is possible to appreciate music in of “popular entertainer” than were those ways that may be illegible to musicians critics who positioned him as a “seri- themselves, and the ontological fissures Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 ous artist.” Indeed, as DeVeaux has ar- between bebop dancers and musicians gued, even this pervasive image of bebop- should push us to imagine a robustly het- musician-as-maverick-artist was itself a erogeneous concept of “music apprecia- performative strategy crafted by skillful tion” that moves beyond mere fidelity or musician/entertainers such as Gillespie lack thereof to the precise epistemologies to satisfy the taste of white hipsters who through which musicians conceptualize craved the vibe of an authentic, anticom- and value their own work. Such a para- mercial jam session experience and were digm shift offers a counterweight to any willing to pay for it.43 clean, ideological narrative of jazz’s sonic Given Gillespie’s above claim, however, evolution into a form of expression that what are we to make of his retrospective can only be properly appreciated, and disdain for those who wanted to “dance only properly respected, when audiences close and screw” and to whom a flatted listen from a posture that performatively fifth was ostensibly illegible? Gillespie’s erases their own bodies as participating frustration here is that dancing audienc- agents in the event. es failed to appreciate those aspects of Indeed, as a practice, bebop dance ex- bebop music he himself most prized: in poses the separation of the terms “danc- this case, its extended harmonic language ing” and “listening” as a false dichotomy. and layers of asymmetric rhythmic com- Even as DeVeaux critiques the prestige plexity. However, his lamenting criticism culture of the concert and concert hall, he could also suggest that, while he was a reifies the value judgments of its partic- brilliant musician, he may have lacked ular choreography of listening when he the kinesthetic “chops” to properly ap- claims that even in the Savoy Ballroom, preciate the subtle complexities of bebop the increasing virtuosity of jazz music dancers’ movement. In fact, bop dancers’ led to moments where “dancing would penchant for “off-time” dancing yielded occasionally be supplanted by listening” a fluid range of intricate, multilayered re- and claims that concerts required listen- lationships with “those four solid beats” ing with undivided attention. Through in the music. It may be that the metric multilayered metric play, bebop danc- subtleties of virtuoso social bebop dancers made active choices about where and ers’ treatment of pulse were as illegible how to experience the musical pulse and to Gillespie as his flatted fifths were to phrasing, both how to ride it and how to them. What this possible disconnect sug- deviate from it when they so chose. This gests more broadly is that jazz history’s musical experimentation with rhythmic strong focus on musicians’ perspectives, dissonance and polymeter either imme- through oral history and autobiography diately followed or was coterminous with

148 (2) Spring 2019 47 “You Can’t the height of off-time bop dancing. Such body as a site of liberation, not for black Dance to It” parallels place bop dancers not among people from oppression but for white some broad-brushed construct of “the people from whiteness.46 masses,” those supposedly underedu- Indeed, both still and moving listen- cated jazz consumers seeking some cheap ing practices represent African American form of casual listening pleasure ostensi- jazz listeners’ claims to corporeal agen- bly out of step with genuine musical in- cy in resistance to the various determin- novation. Rather, the social history and isms inscribed upon their bodies. Artic- temporal dynamism of bop dancing in- ulating the corporeal agency of listening vite us to see African American youth as bodies necessarily invites a more robust

virtuosic listeners who not only respond- engagement with Ingrid Monson’s work Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 ed to bop musicians’ innovations but also on “perceptual agency” than space af- contributed their own layers to its in- fords me here, but certainly the relation- vigorating soundscape as active partici- ship Monson seeks to explore between pants in what musicologist Brigid Cohen, the auditory and the political could pro- borrowing a term from cultural theorist ductively involve both the internal ex- Homi Bhabha, has called postwar New perience and externally perceivable ex- York City’s “vernacular cosmopolitan pressions of diverse listening bodies.47 negotiation,” through which avant-garde What is important to remember is that musical innovation flowed across genres embodied, danced ways of knowing are within the ethnically diverse social spac- and have long been central to jazz, as they es that fueled multiple emergent mod- are and have been to many forms of Af- ernisms.44 rican American music. As cultural theorist Fred Moten beautifully writes in his To conclude, I would like to turn back to work on the black radical tradition, “It perspectives from dance studies and spe- was always the whole body that emit- cifically performance theorist André Lep- ted sound: instrument and fingers, bend. ecki’s notion of “choreopolitics.” Lep- Your ass is in what you sing. Dedicated to ecki offers choreopolitics as a specifical- the movement of hips, dedicated by that ly resistant mode of engagement with movement, the harmolodically rhyth- those structures enforcing choreograph- mic body.”48 At the same time, ethno- ic constraints, which he terms “choreo- musicologist Matt Sakakeeny’s evoca- policing” or the authoritarian contain- tive account of a silent march against vi- ment of movement that yields “a policed olence in New Orleans demonstrates that dance of quotidian consensus.”45 While a pointed refusal to make joyful noise can it is tempting to position the danced lis- resonate with poignance as can a digni- tening of applejackers as choreopoliti- fied listener engaged in active, defiant cal in a way the concertized, “choreopo- nonmovement.49 Just as sound and si- liced” seated listening more often associ- lence can be both profound and banal, re- ated with bebop is not, it is a temptation sistant and compliant, so too can motion I wish to resist. I posit, rather, that black and stillness. As Foster explains, individ- nonmovement functions as a choreopo- ual performances can respond to chore- litical resistance to the overdetermined ographies on a spectrum ranging from fetishization of black bodies. The perfor- conformity to subversion to total disre- mance of nonmovement, in erasing the gard. These performative responses to body, resists the white gaze as well as the choreographic prescriptions both impact white leftist desire to mobilize the black and are impacted by the particularity of

48 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences their circumstances as, in Foster’s words, Still Matters,” by which I mean the liter- Christopher J. “both choreography and performance al material bodies of jazz’s audiences and Wells change over time; both select from and how those audiences’ modes of listen- move into action certain semantic sys- ing both inform and resist the narrative tems, and as such, they derive their mean- conceits of jazz history. It might also in- ing from a specific historical and cultur- vite contemporary listeners to reflect on al moment.”50 Recognizing jazz music’s the ways we do, and specifically don’t, lis- multiple conjuncturally specific choreog- ten to jazz and offer us more space to play raphies of listening, as well as those au- within and against our own socially em- dience performances that work within bedded choreographies as we consider and against these choreographies, offers how we listen, how else we might choose Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 me a chance to highlight the word “mat- to listen, and why. ter” in this issue’s theme of “Why Jazz endnotes 1 Anna Reguero DeFelice of suny Stony Brook, a fantastic dancer whom I met in New York City’s swing dancing scene long before either of us became a musicologist. The performance in question was Indiana University of Pennsylvania Jazz Ensemble, “Mary Lou Williams: Se- lected Works for Big Band,” American Musicological Society Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 7, 2013. This anecdote first appeared in my 2016 post for the Amer- ican Musicological Society’s blog Musicology Now, and I thank the current editors for their blessing to reproduce it here. Christopher, J. Wells, “Choreographies of Listening: Some Thoughts from Doing Jazz History While Having a Body,” Musicology Now, January 6, 2016, http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/2016/01/choreographies-of-listening-some.html. 2 Bernard Gendron, “Moldy Figs and Modernists” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 33. 3 “Risk,” Jazz, dir. Ken Burns, dvd (Burbank, Calif.: Warner Home Video, 2001). 4 Henry Martin and Keith Waters, Jazz: The First Hundred Years, 2nd ed. (New York: Schirmer, 2005), 174. 5 Ibid., 128. 6 David Stowe, Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 182. 7 Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser, To Be or Not To Bop (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), 356. 8 Ibid., 359. 9 Frankie Manning and Cynthia R. Millman, Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop (Phila- delphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 203. 10 Scott DeVeaux, “The Emergence of the Jazz Concert, 1935–1945,” American Music 7 (1) (1989): 6. 11 Ibid. 12 “Harlem Band Swings Down in Atlanta,” Chicago Defender, July 2, 1938. 13 Advertisement, Atlanta Daily World, August 4, 1938. Caps in the original. 14 Advertisement, Atlanta Daily World, May 14, 1939; and “‘Cab’ in All-Colored Show Week from Today,” Atlanta Daily World, July 28, 1938. 15 “Cab Calloway’s Coming this Thursday Awaited,” Atlanta Daily World, July 31, 1938.

148 (2) Spring 2019 49 “You Can’t 16 Lawrence Schenbeck, Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878–1943 (Oxford: University of Mis- Dance to It” sissippi Press, 2012). 17 Gamewell Valentine, “Pageant of Race Progress Viewed at City Auditorium,” Atlanta Daily World, July 12, 1938; and Gamewell Valentine, “Tuskegee Choir Presentation Looms Treat,” Atlanta Daily World, April 26, 1938. 18 Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Rout- ledge, 2011), 4. Foster’s work includes a robust review of the trajectory of the term choreography within dance studies, and thus I will not reproduce it here. 19 Though my discussion here centers on Foster, my thinking is also deeply informed by Kate Els- wit’s concept of “archives of watching” as a means to do close readings of dance spectatorship by blurring the dichotomization of on-stage and off-stage bodies in concert dance spaces, as well as Andrew Hewitt’s notion of “social choreography” as “a way of thinking about the re- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 lationship of aesthetics to politics.” Kate Elswit, Watching Weimar Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), xvii–xxiii; and Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Perfor- mance in Dance and Everyday Movement (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 11. 20 Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington: Indiana Universi- ty Press, 2005), 71. 21 Jeffrey Magee, Fletcher Henderson: The Uncrowned King of Swing (New York: Oxford Universi- ty Press, 2005), 27–38. I riff on Magee’s argument in discussing black jazz listeners’ demon- stration of aural mastery as a means of racial uplift in Christopher J. Wells, “‘The Ace of His Race’: Paul Whiteman’s Early Critical Reception in the Black Press,” Jazz and Culture 1 (2018): 84. 22 David Krasner has shown that prominent black dancers–specifically Ada Overton Walker– sought to rebrand black embodiment as fundamentally dignified and an expression of control in discipline through cakewalk performances and instruction in the 1910s. David Kras- ner, “The Real Thing,” in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890–1930, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Car- olina Press, 2011), 109–118. 23 Mark Whalan, “Taking Myself in Hand: Jean Toomer and Physical Culture,” Modernism/ Modernity 10 (4) (2003): 597–607. 24 M. Oakley Stafford, “Informing You,” Hartford Courant, March 18, 1948. 25 LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 211–212. 26 Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 51. 27 Mura Dehn interviewed by Maria Kandilakis, typescript, in Mura Dehn Papers on Afro-Amer- ican Social Dance (herafter “Mura Dehn Collection”) (New York: Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), box 20, folder 216, 1. 28 Mura Dehn, “The Bebop Era,” drafts for an unfinished manuscript on jazz dance, Mura Dehn Collection, box 1, folder 6. 29 “Mr. Bishop” quoted by Mura Dehn in ibid. I discuss physical culture as a potent, malleable concept in black corporeality in my work on dance as spatial practice in Harlem ballrooms. Christopher J. Wells, “‘And I Make My Own’: Class Performance, Black Urban Identity, and Depression-Era Harlem’s Physical Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, ed. Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellars Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 21–22. 30 Eric Lott, “Double V, Double Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 461.

50 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 31 In her writings, Dehn alternately identifies it as a trend of the 1940s or early 1950s. She also Christopher J. notes “girls also did Applejack–but seldom.” Handwritten notes for The Spirit Moves, Mura Wells Dehn Collection, box 21, folder 60. 32 This sort of heel-toe motion is a fascinating running thread in African American popular dance including movements ranging from the “tic toc” and Charleston in the early twentieth century through the moonwalk and contemporary “floating” slides in various forms of hip hop dance. 33 Dehn, “The Bebop Era,” 4. 34 Ibid., 1. 35 Mura Dehn, “Bop Time,” unpublished draft manuscript, typescript, Mura Dehn Collection,

box 4, folder 80, 1. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/36/1831405/daed_a_01741.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 36 Dehn, “The Bebop Era,” 2. 37 Stowe, Swing Changes, 11. 38 Ibid., 12. 39 Dolores Calvin, “‘Applejack’ Replaces ‘Jersey Bounce’ with Dancers in the State of Jersey,” Chicago Defender, May 8, 1948. Unbracketed ellipses in the original; bracketed ellipses added by the author. 40 Dave Hepburn, “Bebop: Music or Madness?” Our World 4 (1) (1949): 34–35. 41 Dizzy [John Burks] Gillespie, “Daddy of Bebop Says New Music is Here to Stay; Gives Rea- sons,” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 28, 1949. 42 In an interview with Ronald Welburn, Billy Rowe, formerly an entertainment columnist with the Pittsburgh Courier, claimed that guest columns by famous musicians were often penned by those musicians’ press agents, but that “they would try to stick to how the person would react to this sort of thing and get his opinion and write the story.” See Ronald Garfield Welburn, “American Jazz Criticism, 1914–1940” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1983), 234–235. 43 Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1997). 44 Brigid Cohen, “Diasporic Dialogues in Mid-Century New York City: Stefan Wolpe, George Russell, Hannah Arendt, and the Historiography of Displacement,” Journal of the Society for American Music 6 (2) (2012): 149. 45 André Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer,” TDR: The Drama Review 57 (4) (2013): 20. 46 For more on white “slumming” and the political left, see Wells, “And I Make My Own.” For its historiographic resonances, see Ingrid Monson, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,” Journal of the American Mu- sicological Society 48 (3) (1995): 396–422; and John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 47 Ingrid Monson, “Hearing, Seeing, and Perceptual Agency,” Critical Inquiry 34 (S2) (2008): S38. 48 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 39–40. 49 Matthew Sakakeeny, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 169–173. 50 Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 24.

148 (2) Spring 2019 51