Get up offa that thing!

A few days ago I received a CD called "@70s: A Tribute to the Jazz of the 70s." At the bottom of the accompanying press release, it is written (in French):

Practically all tracks can be danced to

This got me thinking about how the three ways in which the dance element seems to have been all but eliminated from jazz:

1. In the music itself, generally speaking, as tempos have sped up, rhythms have became more disjointed and melodies more abstract.
2. Jazz was increasingly percieved as "high art" or "intellectual music" from bebop on, relegating easier, more danceable forms appearing after the Swing Era to footnotes in the history books. Critics seem to take the approach that only the Music That Will Stand The Test Of Time is worthy, allowing them to disregard the more ephemeral, rapidly regenerating fusions of jazz with the dance beats of the day.
3. The disappearance of dancefloors in clubs and at festivals.

I don't know how instructive their point of view is, but Jazz Hot regularly has "Jazz and Dance" features. However, of the ones I've seen, they only cover tap-dancing (a minority sport, by their own admission) and swing dancing (featuring people in ridiculously retro, ridiculous retro and just plain ridiculous clothes). So, essentially (and even if tap-dancing has continued to evolve), they are harking back to when jazz was acknowledged as a dance music, i.e. the Swing Era, implying that dancing to jazz is a thing of the past.

To come back to the CD in question, while I tend to prefer the scrappy side of 70s fusion, the more polished fusion presented here is actually fairly successful in fulfilling its stated goal: the vamp underpinning the saxophone solo on Wayne Shorter's "Elegant People" is, with a little tweaking, a hip-hop hit waiting to happen (maybe it has already happened), "Hang Up Your Hang Ups" is a nice funk work-out and even the bubble-bath-and-candles slinkiness of Hancock's "Butterfly" is without excess schmaltz.

Moving on to the 90s, in Europe the jazz-meets-dancefloor music got named electro-jazz. Again, controversy struck as people like St. Germain, NoJazz, Llorca and Erik Truffaz in France, Marc Moulin in Belgium or Bugge Wesseltoft in Norway sold boatloads. Slightly more experimental, but still relatively popular, are Norwegians Nils Petter Molvaer and Jaga Jazzist. Americans are following suit, such as Tim Hagans's "Animation/Imagination" project and, in a more soul/funk/hip hop vein, the recent Roy Hargrove "RH Factor."

While some of them really aren't that great (NoJazz and Marc Moulin spring to mind), what the smugly mocking reviews overlooked is that these albums seek to produce one or two dancefloor anthems (St. Germain's "Rose Rouge" and Marc Moulin's "Into the Dark," for example), rather than a sit-down-and-listen-to-me experience. They've taken the place that popular B-3 organ trios and Lou Donaldson boogaloos used to occupy in jukeboxes (and that a group like Soulive is trying to continue).

So, of course, this leads to the question: "So what's the importance of people dancing, or not dancing, to jazz?" For me, its importance is in showing that jazz isn't only about sitting down and teasing out the meaning of harmonic puzzles set up by the musicians (to take one caricature), but that it is also a physical, light-hearted music that can play in the fields of both "low" and "high" art and not care. Also, I think that it gives a better, broader picture of how jazz has remained in the general consciousness than simply saying that jazz ceased to be a popular music (in both senses of the term) after the advent of bebop. Perhaps the impression that one can't just have a good time listening to jazz is one reason why so few people listen to it in the first place.