“A Fine Art in Danger”: Marshall Stearns’s Jazz Dance Advocacy in the Age of Folklorism and Scientism
Marshall Stearns, founder of the Institute of Jazz Studies, played a substantial role in bringing jazz music institutional credibility as a form of “high art” by crafting what John Gennari has termed a “consensus narrative” of jazz history. Throughout the 1950s and until his death in 1967, Stearns also advocated fiercely for the cultural elevation of jazz dance. In addition to substantial archival and oral history research, he collaborated with black dancers for numerous lecture recitals and television appearances everywhere from the Today Show to the Playboy Penthouse to the United Nations to the Newport Jazz Festival. This work culminated in a posthumously published monograph: Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance that remains the most substantial and comprehensive history available for contemporary practitioners, myself included, of vernacular jazz dances.
Stearns’s dance advocacy, however, largely failed to take hold within academia or with major funding organizations (including the US State Department) in the ways his music advocacy did. My talk, grounded in extensive research in Stearns’s archival materials, focuses on his work in the late 1950s with professional lindy hop dancers Al Minns and Leon James. Within the context of American institutional patronage of the arts during the Cold War, and specifically at the intersection of folklorism and scientism as governing aesthetic ideologies, I argue that Stearns’s emphasis on jazz dance’s precarity failed to reproduce the articulation of contemporary innovation to rich tradition that drove his “consensus narrative” for jazz music. In addition, academia’s anticorporeal Cartesianism at midcentury yielded vastly different conditions of possibility for music and dance, revealing the complex negotiation through which jazz had to check its dancing bodies at the door in order to enter the ivory tower as a form of ostensibly transcendent, modernist concert music. As a coda, I discuss how Stearns’s successes and failures may offer guidance and cautionary tales for those of us currently advocating for, desigining, and executing more diverse and inclusive university curricula in the arts.
Biography
Christopher J. Wells is assistant professor of musicology at Arizona State University's School of Music and managing editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies. He received his doctorate in 2014 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where his dissertation on drummer/bandleader Chick Webb and swing music in Harlem during the Great Depression received the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award and UNC’s Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology. He has also received Videmus’s Edgar A. Toppin Award for Outstanding Research in African American Music and a Morroe Berger/Benny Carter Jazz Research Fellowship from the Institute of Jazz Studies. A social jazz dancer for over a decade, Professor Wells is currently writing a book about the history of jazz music’s ever-shifting relationship with popular dance and has a chapter in the recently published in the "Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity."