A glamorous opening night in November 1919 saw 5,800 paying customers at the new Hammersmith Palais (or Palais de Danse, because it was a classy joint). A few nights later, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band took up residence there. They had already played the London Hippodrome and Palladium, in nightclubs, and at a Victory Ball at the Savoy attended by George V. Now, with a recent recording of 17 tunes for Columbia in a London studio, they stayed at the Palais for six months.
It was a moment when the entwined trajectories of jazz and popular dance were most closely interwoven. Jazz has moved toward dance (Dixieland, swing), away from it (bebop, free jazz), and back again as it has evolved. Just now, the jazz heard by the largest number of people is dance music once again, with new beats.
That, though is not the story Bruce Lindsay is relating in this thoroughly researched book. It is a social history of popular dance, and its soundtracks, focussing on the UK but with references to the US or Europe when they fed into the dance scene here.
For Lindsay, that scene began in urban pleasure gardens in the eighteenth century, when a population without space for dancing in the barn or on the village green found new venues for an ancient pastime. He traces the development of dance spaces as part of the entertainment business – there were perhaps 11,000 dance halls in the UK by the mid-1920s – through the revolution of recorded music, and into the era of disco (dance space and music genre).
Through it all there was the rise of dancing to recorded tracks, and the emergence of the DJ, an operator largely in the background at the gramophone dances already happening in the 1920s gradually transmuting into the curator of sound we know today in clubs or on radio.
If you want to know about the venues, about a dizzying array of briefly flaring dance crazes, or the music that drew the dancers, you’ll find all that here, brought together from extensive research in books, local and national newspapers, TV archives and music and industry periodicals. The whole story is told methodically, with flashes of wry humour – after detailing the twenty-eight positions early twentieth-century dance enthusiasts had to learn to master the tickle-toe Lindsay remarks that “at no point does it appear that toes were actually tickled”.
Some chapters are a little dry, as lists of venues, entry and drink prices, dress codes, admission policies and preferred recordings reel by in profusion. There is not much to give an impression of what it was actually like to dance in the halls, clubs or discos he catalogues, although a little personal testimony does come into the last decades covered here, the 1960s and 1970s.
The glitterball of the title, like the gramophone, moving pictures, and jazz, was a US innovation (from 1916) that found its way into UK dance culture. And jazz, real or fake, does have a place in this account, though usually an incidental one. That began when no-one really knew what jazz was, so The Original Dixielanders’ recordings competed with releases that had jazz in their title but were “nothing of the sort”, Lindsay avers. The assertion is borne out when he notes that some were from the band of the Coldstream Guards, while music hall star Florrie Forde’s offering was titled “Heigh Ho Jazz it with Me”.
Jazz also found a place in compilations of dance tunes put out to cash in on the early days of the discotheque, so easy listening pianist and orchestra leader Peter Duchin’s The Peter Duchin Discotheque Dance Party in 1964 featured Hello Dolly, The Girl from Ipanema and Watermelon Man, each with its designated dance, along with songs by Alen Toussaint and Ray Charles. And in the disco (music) era a few notable jazz players leant in that direction. Cab Calloway, always the showman, re-recorded Minne the Moocher in a disco arrangement featuring wah wah guitar, strings, and electric keyboard. “It worked”, Lindsay assures us. So, he judges did Ethel Merman’s disco set of American songbook titles, aided by session players Bud Shank and Ernie Watts. Less expected is to learn about the Benny Golson’s 1978 release “I’m Always Dancin’ to the Music”, whose title track he considers “a classic”. Well, possibly a disco classic, but assuredly not a jazz classic. (He does not comment on the rather weird confection from Sonny Rollins, Disco Monk, which the great man recorded a year later on the perhaps aptly titled LP Don’t Ask.)
But these are diverting snippets in a larger story which chronicles one country’s varied responses to the perpetually recurring impulse to dance, whether it leads to essaying the “Milke-Mayds Bobb” or “Cuckolds all in a roe” from John Playford’s The English Dancing Master of 1651 or to enjoying a modern DJ set with its finely calculated modulations of beats per minute. It’s a forceful reminder that, although ours is not one of the cultures encountered fairly often by ethnomusicologists where the words for music and dance are the same, the two are rarely separated for long.
