Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance

In Jazz Dance, Marshall and Jean Stearns have created a vibrant, authoritative record of this thoroughly American contribution to the world of dance and music. Drawing upon years of close involvement with jazz in America, they have traced, studied, and organized a history so rich and complex that it is unique in the literature of dance. Their remarkable enthusiasm and depth of scholarship have produced a book that, like Marshall Stearns's The Story of Jazz, should become the definitive work in its field. Most of the material in Jazz Dance is taken from more than two hundred interviews with dancers, musicians, choreographers, and observers of jazz. Jazz dance, like jazz itself, has its origins in Africa, and was brought to the West Indies and southern United States by slaves. In the West Indies, African dance took on some new characteristics; in New Orleans it was influenced by European tradition; in more remote areas it remained relatively unchanged, and is distinctly traceable to its sources today. The history of American jazz dance is uniquely linked to the evolution of jazz music, the status of the Negro in American society, the economics of show business, and the volatile music industry. It has its rival factions, its colorful heroes, its legends, its fashions, and its trends. It evolved from slave folk dances through the early minstrel shows to Harlem, Tin Pan Alley, and Broadway. Passed from the folk to the professionals - great dancers like Williams and Walker, King Rastus Brown, Bill Robinson, Coles and Atkins, Fred Astaire, and John W. Bubbles - jazz dance took hold of the country. In each generation the people and the professionals danced to jazz. They danced the Cakewalk, the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, the Shimmy, and the Twist; they tapped, stomped, shuffled, and glided through the Soft Shoe. And, though times change and fads vanish, people are still dancing - to jazz. Some of the best documentation on the history of jazz dance is visual, and for this reason two important appendices are included here. One is an exhaustive list of films - documentaries, television productions, and full-length motion pictures - complied by Ernest Smith, an expert in this field, in which jazz dance may be seen. The other is analysis, in labanotation, of basic African, popular American, and jazz dance movements, charting their striking similarities as well as their less obvious differences. This work has been contributed by Nadia Chilkovsky Nahumck, the noted dancer and teacher, currently a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of the Philadelphia Academy of Dance. In addition to these appendices, the book includes many valuable photographs, some from private collections, of great American jazz dancers in performance.