New World A-Comin’: A Century
of Jazz and Modern Dance
Twentieth-century America produced two great and enduring performing art forms: jazz music and modern dance. Both incubated in vernacular cultures of the fin de siècle. Both embraced the expressive vitality of a brave new century. And both were ambitious to be taken seriously, which meant that, sooner or later, the dancers (sooner) and the musicans (later) would need to assert their artistic autonomy.
Modern dance had no pedigree in "high" culture. On one side, it defined itself in opposition to classical ballet; on the other side, it fought long and hard to distinguish itself from vaudeville, skirt dancing, burlesque, and other popular dance entertainments. In order to elevate the status of dance from a suspect profession of "ill repute" to a fine art, early choreographers severed any connection to leg dancing, instead claiming for dance an ancient heritage as a sacred and noble art form. Isadora Duncan invoked the Greeks, and Ruth St. Denis recalled the traditions of Asia.
Jazz music-and-dance (the two were inseparable back then) was anathema to modern dance, not just because of its roots in jook joints and honky-tonks, but because of its racial origins. Isadora Duncan railed against jazz in the 1920s, describing its "tottering, ape-like" movements as "the sensual convulsions of the Negro," unclean and ignoble. Ted Shawn called jazz "the scum of the great boiling that is now going on," and dismissed it as the material of an "alien" race. (Nevertheless, Shawn later went on to make dances with African-American themes.) As a result, jazz music was largely absent from the early years of modern dance. Even during its Americana phase, in the 1930s, the leading choreographers bypassed contemporary jazz. Instead, "American" turned out to mean pioneers, Native Indians, cowboys—and, on occasion, slaves. The irony of this estrangement is that jazz and modern dance were such compatibly self-conscious expressions of artistic and social freedom.
"Freedom," however, is itself subject to regulation. Jazz was too free for white America. Duncan, a counter-culture heroine, espoused freedom all her life, but she condemned "this deplorable modern dancing, which has its roots in the ceremonies of African primitives" as uncontrollably chaotic. And when society dancers Irene and Vernon Castle, guided by bandleader James Reese Europe, popularized African-American social dances for their tony cabaret audiences, they whitewashed the originals, rendering them acceptably genteel. These "modern dances" (so named before the concert form) in the early 1910s fed the appetite of white audiences for unfettered self-expression. As the poet James Weldon Johnson observed: "On occasions, I have been amazed and amused watching white people dancing to a Negro band in a Harlem cabaret; attempting to throw off the crusts and layers of inhibitions laid on by sophisticated civilization; striving to yield to the feel and experience of abandon; seeking to recapture a state of primitive joy in life and living; trying to work their way back into that jungle which was the original Garden of Eden; in a word, doing their best to pass for colored." Most Euro-Americans, however, were not frequenting Harlem nightclubs. They did not want to pass for, or even pass close to, colored. But they did desire—from a safe distance—the sense of exotic freedom that they saw in jazz. The Jazz Age ushered in American modernism, its fantasized Africanist body making possible a new definition of white "American" culture.
Paul Taylor implies as much in Oh, You Kid! (1999), his collaboration with Rick Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. In characteristic Taylor fashion, he chose a musical suite—in this case, ragtime dance tunes—with potent cultural associations, and then proceeded to deconstruct them. The pre-World War I music conjures up playful, nostalgic images—Keystone Kops, cooch dancers, and music hall follies. But when we look around back of those images, what we find is a Ku Klux Klan kickline. Ragtime, like every incarnation of jazz, bespeaks an age, a people, a cultural dynamic, a particular set of race relations. As one audience member suggested during a forum with collaborators Bill T. Jones and pianist/composer Fred Hersch, we need to ask, "freedom" for whom?
The cultural divide between jazz music and modern dance was perpetuated institutionally during the mid-1930s by the Federal Dance Project, which excluded vaudeville, variety, and musical theatre dancers from eligibility for employment, because those forms were defined as entertainment rather than art. As dance historian Ellen Graff has pointed out, dancers such as Mura Dehn and Edna Ocko, who honed their techniques uptown at the Savoy Ballroom rather than a Greenwich Village studio, did not meet the criteria for a "real" dancer. And neither did the majority of African-American dancers, whose choices in professional dance were limited to popular venues.
Dance historian John Perpener has noted that African-American choreographers who aimed for a stage career faced a dilemma, between the Eurocentrism of modern dance and the African-American tradition of vaudeville and musical theatre, which had emerged out of minstrelsy—a form that Charles Williams, director of the Hampton Institute Creative Dance Group, called "the lowest type of theatre." Many dancers aspired to become more than "Cotton-Club types," explains Perpener, and modern dance, notwithstanding its racialist practices, offered them an avenue of serious artistic study beyond the stereotypes that clung to vaudeville and musical theatre. The question remained, would jazz music have a place in their work?
Eugene Von Grona’s American Negro Ballet premiered in 1937, performing to Duke Ellington as well as Bach and George Gershwin. Hemsley Winfield presented concerts featuring black composers, incuding Ellington. But those were the exceptions, not the rule. For the most part, African-American pioneers turned to African sources (Charles Williams, Pearl Primus, Katherine Dunham, Asadata Dafora) and slave spirituals (Edna Guy, Charles Williams, and Winfield) rather than contemporary jazz. Dunham refused to honor the European distinction between art and entertainment, choreographing theater concerts as well as revues and musicals. The third act of her 1962 revue, "Bamboche," featured African-American songs and dances—gospel, spiritual, the shimmy, Charleston, and cakewalk. The immensely popular "Le Jazz Hot" revue (1940) also featured a selection of barrelhouse social dances. Primus, too, included some spirituals, jazz, and blues in a repertory that addressed a variety of African and African-American practices and experiences.
Jazz music made more frequent appearances in the work of second-generation modern choreographers, many of whom emerged from the companies and classes of Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, and Helen Tamiris. Jean Erdman’s The Castle (1970), for example, was co-choreographed by clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, who, along with the dancers, improvised parts of the work. The former Graham dancer also choreographed Four Portraits from Duke Ellington’s Shakespeare Album, a semi-improvised satire that premiered in 1958. Esther Junger, who had danced in musicals and with Tamiris, created productions such as Negro Themes (1935), as well as Judgment Day (1940) and Go Down Death (1930), both performed to poems by James Weldon Johnson. She adopted Ellington music for Negro Sketches (1940).
Anna Sokolow, a former Graham dancer whose work emphasized social commentary on contemporary life, saw jazz as one of the most profoundly expressive forms of her day. Concerned with the existential plight of the human condition, Sokolow often used jazz scores, many by third stream jazzman Teo Macero (Le Grand Spectacle, 1956; Session '58, 1958; Dreams, 1961; Forms, 1964; Opus '60, 1960; Opus '65, 1965; Time Plus Six, 1966; Memories, 1967; Time Plus Seven, 1968). Kenyon Hopkins composed the score for her 1955 masterwork, Rooms, and she choreographed Jelly Roll Morton’s A Short Lecture and Demonstration on the Evolution of Ragtime (1952).
The New Dance Group, formed in 1932 as a community organization that engaged social and political issues through its company and school, drew upon what was then called "folk material." In 1941 the group presented "America Dances," a program of "authentic Folk, Social, and Jazz dances and their influence on the Modern Concert Dance." It was a rare encounter between Euro-American modern dance and African-American vernacular dance-and-music. Besides Sophie Maslow’s Dust Bowl Ballads (1941) to Woody Guthrie, Jane Dudley’s Harmonica Breakdown (1941) to "Blind" Sonny Terry, and Lee Sherman’s Jazz Trio, the concert featured the Lindy Hoppers and Margot Mayo and her American Square Dance Group. Dudley had already made use of a Billie Holiday song in 1937; in 1945, she composed New World A-Comin’, again to music by Terry. For Poem (1963), Maslow fused an Ellington score with Lawrence Ferlinghetti poetry. She used Ellington again for Such Sweet Thunder in 1975.
By the mid-1940s, the popularity of the big bands was waning, and the same issue of artistic autonomy and cultural legitimacy that choreographers had faced decades earlier came to a flashpoint for jazz composers. Like the African-American dancers of the 1920s and 1930s, African-American jazz musicians struggled with their complicated connection to dominant culture. "The music of my race is something which is going to live," Ellington said, "something which posterity will honor in a higher sense than merely that of the music of the ballroom." As much as he respected the ballroom—that was his source—he reached for something "higher." He spent his career negotiating this tricky balance, between roots in the honky-tonk and aspirations toward Carnegie Hall. He challenged the line between high and low, serious and popular, white and black. Ellington’s ambitions fueled the debate about the relationship of jazz music to dance.
According to dancer and writer Roger Pryor Dodge, jazz was a dance music, but it, like all art, needed to evolve. Dodge was a classically-trained dancer who discovered jazz in the mid-1920s and partnered Mura Dehn in the 1930s. He had been featured in Skycrapers, billed as the first jazz-ballet in 1926, and then began choreographing his own jazz dances to the likes of Ellington’s "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" and "Black and Tan Fantasy." In his 1945 article, "The Dance-Basis of Jazz," Dodge took a long view on the debate, neither condemning jazz to the dance hall nor condoning its complete divorce from the rhythm of dance. Cautioning that the jazz musician should never lose touch with the rhythm of the dance floor, he anticipated that the jam session would develop jazz as a "listener’s music." That split, observes saxophonist/composer Phil Woods, did have repercussions. "When they stopped dancing to jazz, jazz lost a lot of credibility and popularity. People don’t really understand what jazz is anymore."
It was largely Ellington who facilitated the infiltration of jazz music into modern dance in the 1950s and 1960s, because, by bridging the breach between art and popular music, he made jazz music more acceptable to a modern dance community that had self-consciously constructed itself as a legitimate art form. For Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty, and Alvin Ailey, modern dance had found its soulmate. Their approach to choreography came less from a drive for modernist purity than from personal experience and artistic training that integrated art and life and social concerns.
McKayle studied on scholarship at the New Dance Group studio and performed with Maslow, Dudley, Erdman, and Graham, among others. His signature work, Games, about children’s ghetto street life, debuted on a joint concert with Daniel Nagrin in 1951. (Jazz music would prove integral to Nagrin’s repertory, too, which included Strange Hero (1948), a "dance portrait" of a gangster-character set to a progressive jazz score for large orchestra by Stan Kenton and Pete Rugolo.) Accompanied by New Orleans jazz, District Storyville (1962) depicted the birth of jazz, set in a turn-of-the-last-century bordello and loosely based on Louis Armstrong’s early career. The score itself reflects the evolution of jazz, beginning with a funeral procession brass band and climaxing with a battle of the horn players. Reflections in the Park, an episodic look at city life—sometimes romantic, sometimes violent—through the eyes of a young couple in Central Park, was specially commissioned by The Modern Jazz Society of Hunter College. McKayle collaborated with composer Gary McFarland; for the premiere in 1964, the musicans assembled across the back of the stage, while the dancers performed in front of them.
Beatty, whose work reflects both his sense of musicality and his deep engagement with issues of race and culture, was a principal dancer with Dunham before making his choreographic debut in 1948. His breakthrough came with The Road of the Phoebe Snow (1959), set to an Ellington (and Strayhorn) score, as were The "Way Out" East St. Louis Toodle-oo (1958), Congo Tango Palace (1960); The Black Belt (1967); and Black, Brown and Beige (1974). His tribute to the composer, Ellingtonia, premiered at the American Dance Festival in 1994. Beatty set Come and Get the Beauty of It Hot (1960) to a variety of jazz composers—Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, and Lalo Schiffrin. In Montgomery Variations (1967), a study in violence, Beatty spliced in the sound of bomb explosions and shouts of "Freedom" by the dancers to a score by Mingus and Davis. Often called a "jazz choreographer," Beatty was much more influenced by Graham’s technique and choreography. "I use all her connective steps," he says, "and I put a little hot sauce on it." Phoebe Snow contains only one jazz step, and there are none in Beauty of It Hot or Black Belt. The jazz component of those dances, he explains, was "our spirit."
Ailey was deeply influenced by the honky-tonks of his Texas childhood and by his training with Lester Horton, whose aesthetic was highly theatrical and thematically multi-cultural. In 1952 Horton choreographed Ellington’s Liberian Suite, which dancer James Truitte adapted for Ailey’s company several decades later. So when Ailey founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958, he was primed for a career-long dialogue with jazz, whose myriad forms—spirituals, blues, jazz—helped him to explore the roots of African-American culture past and present. From beginning (Blues Suite, 1958, and Revelations, 1960) to end (the Ellington cycle), Ailey focused on jazz, including composers such as Gillespie, Mingus, and Charlie "Bird" Parker. His most persistent inspiration, however, was Ellington. Ailey choreographed a dozen of his compositions, culminating in the multi-year "Ailey Celebrates Ellington" project of the mid-1970s, and invited into the repertory Ellington dances by other choreographers, as well.
Eleo Pomare came of age in Harlem in the 1960s, during the heyday of black consciousness, and his dances took a more critical stance toward the black experience in America. He brought to modern dance a voice of protest, and he insisted that jazz be used as a way to break with the dominant Eurocentric aesthetic. His studies were based on the reality and characters of contemporary life, rather than historic or literary sources. His classic Blues for the Jungle (1962) used a combination of jazz and blues overlayed with radio broadcasts, tracing the bleakness of African-American oppression from the slave auction to the ghetto.
In the 1970s jazz made its mark on another group of modern dancers, who adapted for movement the principle of jazz improvisation. Richard Bull started out as a jazz pianist and worked with Lennie Tristano, while supporting himself in part by playing for modern dance classes at Juilliard and the Graham school. After study with Alwin Nikolais exposed him to the use of improvisation in the generation of set choreography, Bull set out to transpose the techniques of jazz improvisation to establish the field of "structured improvisation" in dance. He choreographed more than 100 dances for the Richard Bull Dance Theatre, produced in his New York City loft the work of improvisational dancers for 20 years, and taught, among many others, Blondell Cummings and Bill T. Jones. Cummings is known for her improvisational solos, including The Ladies and Me (1979), set to recordings of female blues singers. Jones adapted the structured improvisation for his early solos. In the years since then, he has jammed with Max Roach, sung old blues songs, and, most recently, collaborated with Fred Hersch on Out Some Place (1999). Ironically, in a reversal of influence, it was Jones’ method of improvising in front of a video camera to generate movement material that inspired Hersch to improvise at the keyboard for a tape recorder.
Dianne McIntyre, for 16 years the director of the Sounds in Motion dance company, has exploited improvisation as a compositional and sometimes performative process since the 1970s. Aiming to merge movement and music, she explores an eclectic range of African-American music, including avant-garde jazz, rhythm and blues, and spirituals, in close collaboration with live musicians such as Roach, Cecil Taylor, and Lester Bowie. She describes the process of creating together the work’s dynamics and flow as "a conversation that becomes composition." Judith Dunn worked in tandem with jazz musician Bill Dixon, producing formal, non-narrative improvisations such as Nightfall Pieces (1967) and 1972-1973 (1973). Their collaborations began with discussion of types of movement or relationships, the performance context, and the performance space, in order to produce a situation in which the dance and music existed separately, with equal importance.
Postmodern innovator Twyla Tharp, known for her eclectic taste in popular music, used jazz to great advantage for her spine-slipping movement style. She scored one of her early hits, in 1971, with Eight Jelly Rolls, a suite of Jelly Roll Morton songs. The Bix Pieces, premiered the same year, was performed to Paul Whiteman’s big band rendition of the trumpeteer Bix Beiderbecke’s music, with a coda to a Theolonious Monk arrangement of "Abide With Me." And for The Raggedy Dances (1972) she used a pastiche of Scott Joplin rags, Mozart variations on "Baa Baa Black Sheep," and modern piano.
At the close of the century, jazz is making new inroads into modern dance. Choreographers as diverse as Ronald K. Brown and Trisha Brown are exploring with fresh eyes a now-classic musical tradition. As part of an ongoing investigation of his African-American identity, Donald Byrd has turned to jazz for source material. In 1996, he created The Harlem Nutcracker, using Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s 1960 arrangement of "The Nutcracker Suite." Byrd made an explicit inquiry into the meaning of jazz in Jazz Train (1998), a three-part collaboration with Geri Allen, Vernon Reid, and Max Roach. "What the process was about for me was to realize that I really didn’t know anything about jazz, and to listen in a new way, like a novice, and to share that experience with an audience," says Byrd. "Jazz doesn’t mean just one thing. It’s actually a part of a living tradition. And it is as diverse as the artists who create it. It’s a risk-taking kind of music, that encourages you to enter this space of not knowing, and entering that space with enthusiasm."
David Parsons, before teaming up with Phil Woods for Fill the Woods With Light (1998), had already gotten hooked on jazz, because of the kinship he felt with improvisation and with the musicians’ nocturnal, gypsy lifestyle. His very first work was a small jazz dance, and since then he has worked with pianist/composer Billy Taylor, the Turtle Island String Quartet, and clarinetist Tony Scott. Parsons sees a strong affinity between the two arts, both "small ensembles of people who work together and are very committed to something that’s not hugely popular in the way that rock and roll or MTV are."
At century’s end, modern dance and jazz music have become revered traditions, their revolutionary moments long passed. It’s a post-modern world, where genres, styles, and cultures are all so much grist for the creative mill. Like everything else, modern dance and jazz music get re-absorbed and re-constituted—and in the process, re-animated. But that’s how they began, really, as concocted hybrids, radical riffs on a culture emerging into the modern world. Dance historian Brenda Dixon-Gottschild argues that modern dance, with its torso articulation, pelvic contraction, and barefoot groundedness, is the product of a "Creolization-cum-segregation" with African dance. So, we have come roundabaout to the same fluid place where we started the century, and you have to wonder if the intervening modernist dictum of "purity" wasn’t just an attempt to conceal its gumbo origins. Jazz is an African-American gift, says Woods. "But if we haven’t come to terms with our Afro-Americans, how are we going to come to terms with Afro-American music? It’s an American problem, and it must be solved."
Orchestral composer/arranger Maria Schneider, who joined forces with Pilobolus to create The Hand That Knocked, the Heart That Fed (1998), combines modern jazz and modern classical writing. Hersch invokes Bach as easily as hambone, or tango. Woods is unsure that his music for Parsons even satisfies the requirements of jazz. "There’s a love song, there’s a rock’n’roll section which we call a belly roll, there’s a waltz, which is very romantic, and there’s a bossa nova. None of those templates qualify as a jazz beat." Such fusion and fracture suits modern dance, which has largely abandoned any pretense of "purity." Jazz, explains Byrd, represents "the diversity of our culture and our uncanny ability to assimilate and transform all kinds of sources into making something new."
Bibliography
Russella Brandman. The Evolution of Jazz Dance from Folk Origins to Concert Stage. 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation. The Florida State University, 1977.
Ann Daly. Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Lewis A. Erenberg. Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Ellen Graff. Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928-1942. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
"Jazz and the Dance." BMI: The Many Worlds of Music. October 1971, pp. 20-23.
John D. Perpener III. The Seminal Years of Black Concert Dance. Ph.D. dissertation. New York University, 1992.