Between Beats The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance

"The book represents a massive effort of commitment and research and deserves to find those readers who will appreciate it." -- Graham Colombé, Jazz Journal "Finally! A compelling account of the movements of jazz across bodies and social circumstances. Crafted with care, and brimming with original archival research, Between Beats demonstrates how social dance operates at the center of concerns including commerce, race, class, white supremacy, nostalgia, and gender. Wells offers an urgent and entirely necessary affirmation of jazz along its unmistakable music-dance continuum." -- Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and Professor of Dance, Duke University "This creative and inspiring book rethinks jazz history through the collective consciousness of Black vernacular dance. If today jazz is 'America's classical music,' it pushed its way into concert and lecture halls by being distanced from the dance cultures that birthed it. With this remarkable study, Christi Jay Wells gives 'body' to jazz studies through a stunning and accessible critique of jazz historiography, scholarly omissions, and racial ideologies. When the music starts, Between Beats asks jazz studies, 'shall we dance?'" -- Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Pianist, Composer, and Music Historian, and Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania "The text richly evokes music and dance in very specific places and times, but common folkways wind their ways through migration, segregation, and integration, both buffeted and nurtured by institutions and industrial structures from Roaring Twenties dance halls to classic Hollywood, to a neighborhood senior center around the turn of the millennium. That Wells juggles that complexity with grace and wit results in a book that is intellectually rewarding and historically evocative, and that makes you want to get up and dance." -- Robynn J. Stilwell, Journal of the Society for American Music