May I Have This Dance? 11 comments

5 Apr 2004 @ 03:28, by Richard Carlson An intense love of solitude, distaste for involvement in worldly affairs, persistence in knowing the Self and awareness of the goal of knowing---all this is called true knowledge. ---The Bhagavad Gita In the blue heavens, cold geese calling. On the empty hills, leaves flying. ---Ryokan Again the blackbirds sing; the streams Wake, laughing, from their winter dreams, And tremble in the April showers The tassels of the maple flowers. ---John Greenleaf Whittier Dancing to the Big Band sound at the Penn State Senior Ball of 1936 I have reason to believe and report to you that the disappearance of the art form and social occasion known as the dance band now is complete. It has been the duty of my generation in America to preside over this evolution, and I have embraced it lovingly hoping hard and often I would not witness extinction. The final struggle took 50 years, which is not long in social or species history---but of course nearly a lifetime for this man. I have evidence, however, it has breathed its last. There was a simple notice in the Events Calendar in Thursday's The Athens News that the Ohio University Jazz Ensemble would perform for dancing at the Athens Community Center on Saturday night. The band is made up of around 15 students playing the traditional instrumentation of this music (3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 5 saxes, 4 rhythm) and I was unaware they had developed a dance repertoire. In most parts of this nation, an opportunity to invite your partner to an actual dance in a ballroom is so rare that I jumped at the chance. I marveled at the wisdom of a teacher/leader to attempt to teach this tradition to a new generation of young people. When we got there, a table was set up at the door and they wanted $25 to get in---but "String Of Pearls" was playing inside, so I plunked down the cash and we walked through the door. In the United States a band of this size initially was constructed for patriotic celebrations in the town square. The armed services had them too, and if you got conscripted during war and could play or learn fast a wind instrument you could do your time in a band. During the Civil War, black units had bands too, and many historians trace the birth of jazz to what these soldiers did with their horns during spare hours. Drums were banned on plantations, but the rhythms of Africa still were fresh in memory. If you saw Martin Scorsese's film about blues, an image probably is forever etched in your memory of a fife player accompanied by 2 guys on snare and bass drums. What an unlikely combination, but what incredible music! In that trio of players you could see blues, jazz, and American dance music born at once into this world. Through the 1920s the nurturing of bands for social occasions that included couples dancing together became strong. White and black bands played very different music, celebrating folk customs of Europe and Africa respectively. But by the early 1930s, members of these bands were seeking each other out after-hours in non-segregated settings...and learning the other's riffs. With the mid-'30s and culminating in the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert by an augmented Benny Goodman band, to include many of the greatest black players of the time, this country had Swing which was a music that combined all the elements of the Melting Pot---and by God, you could dance to it! During the 1940s and into the '50s, there were so many dance and jazz bands, containing around 15 men and women, that no one even could count them all. Any city of 20,000 inhabitants had a local one of its own, to say nothing of the hundreds of bands that were popular enough to travel. They went in cars and sometimes buses, often driving all night to get to the next ballroom. Duke Ellington's band had its own train. Sometimes they formed baseball teams among the musicians, challenging local teams in the towns where they were playing a dance that night. Life on the road apparently was the stuff of legend, and anyone who's lived long enough to be involved in this music has some stories. I became aware of these bands in the late 1940s. My father was program director of a local radio station. In 1948, the long playing record came on the market. The recordings initially made available music originally sold on single 78 rpm sides. A 12" LP could hold six 78s, and so many radio stations started to throw out the older records to make storage space for the new. I was around 3 different radio stations over the decade in which that happened. At first, I listened to anything these stations threw away, but soon I was listening to the bands---and I never stopped. I parted company with the majority of my peers when rock became popular, pledging allegiance instead to this music I found so wonderful and important. In the summer between grade school and junior high, I invited a girl to go to a dance with me at Waldameer Ballroom, an hour's drive from my hometown. The Dorsey Brothers were playing over there in a hall high above the shores of Lake Erie. My father drove us, and then disappeared into the darkness of the great ballroom as the girl and I enjoyed surely one of the most magical evenings of our lives. The space was immense, all wood, and the sound so glorious I hear it in my mind even now. The great and inevitable glittering ball reflected lights on a packed floor of dancers who really knew their stuff. The trick in this kind of dancing was to know the actual arrangement so well that you could anticipate what was going to happen with your movements. When you had enough people who were doing this, the musicians would respond with such inspiration that the love between players and patrons was tangible. By the 1960s and '70s you could count the number of bands remaining on your fingers. Television and stereo were keeping people home, and musicians had to find work in those studios instead of on the road. There were obvious advantages for family men among those players, but jazz fans deplored these developments---and I hate to say we often blamed those guys for the death of the music. We overlooked that increasingly there just was nowhere else to play---no ballrooms, no clubs, no bars that could afford anything more than a couple of guitars. Stan Kenton had the idea that universities could house bands, and through teaching the music maybe preserve it. At first it worked pretty well. Since jazz and dance music never had been taught in school, the first people hired were musicians who knew how to do it. Improvising is not easily taught, nor is a knack for swinging. If your dad or mom knew it, probably you had a better chance of picking it up than somebody taking music lessons. The first college stage bands were pretty tense affairs, and very difficult to listen to. But after a very few years, and some excellent arrangements written especially for them, they began to get good. Through the 1980s and 1990s, many of them became very fine indeed---and I used to attend any concerts I heard about. At the same time larger cities across the nation developed excellent adult stage bands that were held together through subscription and concert appearances. But then inevitably probably, the thread of continuity began to get lost. The guys who led those bands---guys who had been on the road themselves---began to retire and die off. The kids who had been taught were hired to take over...but never had been in a band that actually toured and developed a resulting ensemble sound, or even played out at a dance. They don't have the feel for it...and can't inspire when they stomp off the downbeat. The kids never have danced to the music they're trying to play. The students Saturday night were struggling and working way too hard. They hadn't rehearsed or not done it before or not done it enough. There were moments of loss that were excruciating. The dancers made the best of it, but most of them seemed to be at least 70 years old, which means the audience and demand is getting even more sparse. One bright note---and maybe a glimmer of hope: in the crowd were 4 OU students (and that's all the students who were there) who must have taken some kind of dance lessons. They were rockin' out with all the right moves, and having the time of their lives. I don't know where they came from or what it means, but maybe the music is carrying on after all. Perhaps somewhere in their consciousness is a ghostly ballroom down a country lane, with the strains of Glenn Miller playing a romantic ballad, and the soft sound of shoe leather gliding across a wooden floor.

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