“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 of- fer the concept of “choreographies of listening” to interrogate jazz’s range of socially enforced move- ment “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” be- bop 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 do- ing 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 © 2019 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences doi:10.1162/DAED_a_01741 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 mov- ed 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, mod ern, 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.