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Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance By Christi Jay Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021
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Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance By Christi Jay Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021
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Book Review
Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance By Christi Jay Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021
2023
Overview
Recounting the experience of lindy-hopping to a live band performing Ted Buehrer's transcription of Mary Lou Williams's music at the 2013 American Musicological Society's annual meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, Wells felt that gravity pull their “ass into a chair” when the “band crossed the ‘bebop’ moment” and the music went from being music for dancing to music to be listened to respectfully… never mind that they still felt the impulse to dance, intellectually and corporeally. 1 Wells also quotes Emily Clark, who illustrates “how jazz as practice, history, and historiography—replete with both explicit and implicit miscegenation fantasy tropes—is and long has been firmly imbricated within the discursive feedback loop of the New Orleans plaçage complex to which the quadroon balls gave rise” (38).2 To a great extent, this combination of social/cultural history and mythology becomes the ordering metaphor of Between Beats, as Wells expands on the productive tension between “fact” and narrative, between history and mythology. Ramsey's influential 2003 book had posited “the social dance” as one such site in Black communities (210).5 Dance, as a physical expression of music, is slippery to explicate.
