Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance,” Ezra Pound wrote in the introduction to The ABC of Reading. And: “Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.” He might have added that, in celebration of the Lord, David the King danced and sang before the Ark of the Covenant. Or that in the store-front revivalist churches of Harlem and the urban South, the beat of the hymns was marked by the clapping of hands and the tapping of feet.
That jazz and the dance were from the beginning inextricably intertwined is hardly an original observation. The work songs and pats, the spirituals that were secularized and became the blues, the chants of the roustabouts— all of these, funneled into jazz at the turn of the century, involved physical movement. The strutting players in New Orleans marching bands were in their own way dancing. The legendary Buddy Bolden shouted and trumpeted his funky-butt music to dancers, not passive listeners. And the “professors” at the piano in the bagnios of the Vieux Carré were provoking the dance, though hardly the kind featured on the black vaudeville circuits.
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