Flash of the Spirit

Jazz field notes from YYC and beyond

Devoted to jazz for decades, Michèle Moss offers a uniquely Canadian context to the form, sharing excerpts from her field notes during a year of sabbatical research – from Calgary to Winnipeg to Toubab Dialaw, Senegal.

RHYTHM. The topic is close to the bone for me. I’m an intrepid consumer of jazz music, fanatical about the form. I appreciate the tradition but really love the innovation. I appreciate the standards but go weak over a sound that’s heavy on percussion, fused with a clave and Latin flute that weaves and changes.

Usually I meet my craving for rhythm through watching old musicals, social dancing at a house party, in my own kitchen, or listening to some music and choreographing in my mind. As a little girl from the UK, I landed in Canada by way of Montréal, settling in Calgary. I have had a full life to this point as a woman, wife, mother, educator and choreographer. As a young dancer, I came to appreciate rhythm through blues and funk, through percussion, vocals and stories. I found I could easily read dancing bodies to replicate their movement. As I watched Soul Train, I was drawn in, quite literally moved, out of my chair to try the steps. Oh how I loved the soul and

funk dances I learned – the bump was seriously fun!

All people have stories, references and ancestral communications that pass through us and need to be expressed. I mine these and dig them, deeply. Yes, the words conjure images of physical work. While this mining and digging has been lifelong, I am now forced to bring my legs down, closer to the earth, and move from modern jazz expression to more vernacular expressions (if only because my arabesque and jumps are not what they were). The shuffle, stomp, drag and chug are satisfying.

In this past sabbatical year, I’ve made taking field notes a ritual as I take to the world to share and speak to practitioners about their jazz practices. In order to create in the jazz idiom, I believe in having appropriate grounding and understanding of the form. I listen to stories, dream and continue to educate myself on the current happenings, the history, the annals and the artists/ personalities of note in both jazz music and dance. It’s only then that I move into my creative space and hopefully find something innovative, something personal, to say from inside the idiom.

The work orients towards the political, towards human rights and the zeitgeist. That’s jazz! It has an opinion; it requires a stance, an attitude, a POV.

What we often don’t realize is that jazz is alive and open to change. Jazz is not only lindy hop or modern jazz technique such as Luigi; it can be archival and authentic, ultra-urban, theatrical or vernacular. As I read jazz history books, read the poetry associated with the form, read between the lines in news streams, meet the music artists, take in visual art, read liner notes, join the crowd at a festival, take my seat in the theatre or concert hall or take myself on the road to research, I have been filled up – my life enhanced by jazz.

MARCH 2019, CALGARY

Still trying to get going on this writing project. The question is how can I draw in the reader and hold their attention?

The answer is I need a sensory button, on the page, so that the reader can press that button and receive sensory feedback. When you’re talking jazz music and dance, you need to feel it, hear it, smell it, see it in real time, in 3D. #getdown #disco #jookjoint

Remembrance: It’s summer of 1990 and it’s 4:30 in the morning, and I’m out with Buster Brown in downtown New York City. Man, it is hot and sweaty, and I am so tired. Despite being a bit of a party wimp, I’m pushing myself because I don’t want the night to end; we’ve been having A Time! Buster is dressed to the nines, and when he walks he has an uptown swagger of a bygone era. When at last I suggest I’d better get back to my summer sublet, pick up my bags and boogie to the airport for my 6am flight, Buster makes some kind of comment that digs at my feebleness. I take it on the chin; I still feel like a winner – it’s past 4am, after all. Yes, being a jazz dancer, in the vernacular, takes fortitude. Ask any hip hop artist if the parties can be moved to tea time and wait for the quizzical look – you know it ain’t the same!

The night was spent mostly at Smalls, a small uptown club. Heather Cornell and I sat sipping and chatting, pulling stories out of Buster and, of course, dancing. Social dancing with a hoofer of his style and grace was no easy thing; there were foot patterns, arm work and breakaways, with lots of lessons and pointers whispered in my ear. He would point out the tune, his connection to it. It was all very exciting but also slightly stressful. Heather is a United States/Canadian hoofer of Manhattan tap fame. She kindly tried to give me an encouraging eye.

Buster taught me about partner dancing. His was smooth-style and of course had an ol’ skool feel, as a gentleman from another generation. I was well and truly ruffled by the end of the evening, and yet Buster looked as fresh as a daisy. He taught me about flash of the spirit, that is, improvising within a style – a response to music that’s connected to mood and expressed relative to personal temperament. It was so cool to dance with him, and after I relaxed a little, I was able to appreciate his sense of humour and the pleasure of being in the arms of a strong lead. Buster would look good disco dancing or working the footwork at any house dance event. I imagine him at The Loft in Chicago, killing it.

In my dreams I’m in uptown New York City in the forties, any night, at the Savoy Ballroom. I would study the dance floor and join them on the dance floor and take my Shim Sham Shimmy out and dust it off. I so wish I could know more authentic dances. I took class from “Pepsi” Bethel, but I didn’t appreciate the significance at the time. If I had known, I’d ask him what the original song the Tranky Doo was danced to! I want to know what other set dances or strolls were out there that have been lost.

I so often read that jazz is dead, that it’s a niche interest that has had its day. Now, I also read that jazz is finding its way back into popular culture through the likes of Kamasi Washington and Kendrick Lamar. So many people I’ve heard over the years don’t enjoy jazz so much; they think it has messages embedded and they feel they don’t get it. Naturally, they feel excluded and that’s not helpful. Perhaps they feel this way because they don’t know the standards, the jargon, the history, the messages and themes that are embedded, quoted and referenced in the music and the dance.

APRIL 2019, TOUBAB DIALAW, SENEGAL

I’m being righteously skooled by the youth at the workshop I’m at in Toubab Dialaw. Since I’ve been here, I have had lots of time to take class or watch. As I watch them play after teaching class, I’m amazed! So much passion and flavour. Has human development made an incredible genetic jump with this generation? They seem more proficient, more flexible in mind and body, more fierce in their attack and their commitment to being artists. I love watching as they meld and blend the styles: contemporary dance with West African sabar, tap and the party dances of the forties, house and salsa and a myriad of other forms. This is jazz in its most revolutionary style.

I flash back to myself at that age. I

guess I was an empathetic child, and my mother describes me as always giving away all of my chocolate or treats when I was out playing. My mother recognized this quality in me and sent me to dance class.

My parents met on the dance floor. My father, a Jamaican immigrant, had started a youth social dance club in Liverpool. The world swirled a little as postwar couples continued the war tradition of socializing on the dance floor. And yes, the musical soundtrack of wartime was jazz, the popular music of the day, which shifted the physicality – close physical proximity, rhythm and high-flying antics! That soundtrack called to my parents. My mother was a sheltered, well-heeled English girl and had little experience with the dance hall floor. She made her way eventually, on my father’s arm, to the dance hall floor. She continues to enjoy it to this day. She’s got the moves.

And so, when we moved to Canada, to Montréal, I was put into dance class. Was it the collision of cultures, the cross-pollination that led me towards the good fortune to be introduced to dance? I asked my mother why she enrolled me, and she can’t quite remember. My cousins had already been enrolled in dance at Montréal’s NCC (Negro Community Centre), and no doubt she saw the enthusiasm in their eyes and knew there was something special afoot. It was there that I doubled down on my ancestors’ gift to me – my arts heritage.

AUGUST 2019, WINNIPEG

Ding, ding, ding … I hear from the television newscast. Mark this day: 400 years ago, the first enslaved Africans were brought to English colonies in North America.

I’m sitting here in Winnipeg and I hear the bells ring. The bells announce my opportunity to take a moment to recognize the birth of a musical form and its embodied expression, jazz music and dance. Its lineage relates directly to the Atlantic slave trade, the forced migration and history of enslavement and oppression that came to American shores. Its effects are alive and well today, its history manifest on a global stage.

Here I am, roughly 100 years from the birth of jazz, thinking about this history, in a Canadian context.

The birth of jazz is complicated. I take a breath.

I’m in Manitoba charged with making a jazz dance on a company of all white women. This company, NAfro Dance, is celebrating seventeen years in operation under the direction of Casimiro Nhussi, a landed immigrant from Mozambique. The dancers have all trained in this vibrant cultural centre of Winnipeg.

They have mostly trained in ballet and contemporary dance.

Yes, it’s complicated?!

Race has always been a complication in the jazz story. I myself am complicated, for many reasons, not the least of which because I am mixed race. Do I have more of a right than white artists to be digging around in this topic? I think my interest,

devotion and research is my ticket. I’ve made an investment over time.

—

It’s the first day of rehearsal with NAfro. I’ve worked with the company numerous times before.

I have an easy relationship with Casimiro: we met through a Dance Immersion event in Toronto years ago and have collaborated often since then. We’ve both been hosted numerous times by Vivine Scarlett at Toronto’s Dance Immersion and by the International Association of Blacks in Dance. I was happy to co-host with him at a special Banff Centre West African and Cuban Dance Summit intensive in the early 2000s. He is dedicated and committed to making art, bringing in audiences, changing minds and hearts and supporting dancers and dancing of all kinds. He’s a force of positivity and creativity.

So here I am, making a jazz work on dancers who identify as contemporary dance artists. Casimiro has explicitly asked me to make a jazz dance. How to start? Well, I know the artists to be open to anything and everything. I’m happy to work with bodies that have experience with African dance. The West African diasporic essences are found in so much of what I would call authentic, classic or modern jazz and also in many of the party dances I started with. Social dance, the vernacular, was my real foundation for being a jazz dancer.

With NAfro we start improvising to music and embodying as much experimentation and playfulness as possible. The dancers’ abilities are bolstered by their capacity to jump in without fear. They’re able to accept the nudges to nuance the work, in a jazzy way – partly rhythmic – looking for the pulse then playing around the downbeat, sometimes referencing it in a funky way. We enjoy moving across bar line and even playing with some time signatures that are odd and wonderful. My requests for shading from the dancers bring out things I couldn’t imagine – their imagination, their craft in co-creating. The hybrid result is part modern jazz dance and part vernacular jazz expression in a concert form. They understand one of the most important aspects of the form: experimentation is the first tenet of the jazz way. They can easily embody the form, although they are in process, as we all are,

when exploring style. Style is essential in jazz; you gotta know how to put a limp in your walk or a stutter in your knee.

Style is a process of reduction and concentration, an intensifying process all with a heavy dose of personality. Style has always fascinated me. When I see those clips on YouTube of a seven-year-old dancing flamenco with full-on knitted duende eyebrows or a sassy tiny hip hop tot expressing too much attitude for her years, I am slayed. How can these teeny artists dance coupé décalé with full-on adult flavour? I’m also left stunned, enchanted, by the adults who have honed their craft over years and dance these new jazz forms with so much spirit. I continue to be compelled by the similar flair of the dancers I witness in Cuba or West Africa. Is it blood memory manifest? It seems the traditions are heavily marked on their bodies, and it is my pleasure to try to gather in that style.

Dancing with NAfro dancers to Ezra Collective’s You Can’t Steal My Joy is a jubilant experience. I’ve enjoyed moving around the world, reading dancing bodies and trying to reduce what I see to style aspects. I like the way I see the evidence in the African diaspora forms and other social forms, directly related to jazz. I tell the NAfro dancers we need to liberate the torso and the hips. We use a countenance that draws to mind my Jamaican grandmother. I remind them as they improvise to gather the necessary elements: a hunkered stance, the hips, the gaze, complicated weight transfers and some bold accents that test the vestibular system.

At various street or community events in Trinidad, Cuba, Senegal or Guinea, that’s where I see what I want to bottle and sell: personal style, verve and wild abandon. It’s at events such as carnival processionals that I expand my own expressive vocabulary. I borrow a little from James Brown, the furrowed brow and duende of flamenco, the sophistication and complexity of tap dance, the fierceness of Chango and

Oya. I learned a lot from watching my extended family take the floor at basement parties. I like to borrow from the strangers I’ve witnessed at nightclubs, that’s for sure, but I’ve also spent a lot of time in the studio with master teachers. (Thank you, Vicki Willis, for one.) I’ve studied historical forms, cultural forms, and I studied myself.

I think back to one of the many books that I’ve brought with me to Winnipeg, Dolores Kirton Cayou’s Modern Jazz Dance (1971), and recall a reference to Les Ballets Africains. I don’t quite remember, but it may be this book that brought me to study with this company in Guinea. I don’t remember setting my intention from this great nudge, but it seems that’s what the universe facilitated. The introductory chapter describes how African dance is unique in character, style, formation and accompaniment. I’ve barely touched all the continent has to offer in style studies, but I know the art form is for the community. Who knew that I would go on to collaborate with Hamidou Bangoura, artistic director of Les Ballets Africains. Together we shaped a course in the early aughts and offered it to Canadian students of dance at the University of Calgary.

I like to dance the Orishas/Orixá as a way of shaping the body and its emotions. You must change qualitatively to express the various personalities of the pantheon. You get to take on a character and change subtleties to meet the profile. Yemaya is feminine with a rippling quality. Chango is commanding and formidable. Embracing the varied characteristics can turn into a study in dynamic change.

This digging back into the form allows me to move forward, enlivening my contemporary practice without going completely off the jazz path.

Born of mixed parentage, jazz is part West African shuffle, part Irish jig, part Caribbean rum and part American field song, with a heavy dose of struggle and resistance. It is storytelling in motion and the story is a human one – of change, oppression, struggle and prohibition as well as the complications of blackface and appropriation. The form is adaptive and takes on new flavours including reabsorbing styles it gave birth to. In this way, hip hop is not jazz, yet it came out of the jazz tradition.

I appreciate the importance of root essences, of characteristics and aesthetics in the dancing jazz body: stomps, slides,

JAZZ REQUIRES INTERACTION, BUT IT CAN BE PERFORMED AS A SOLO BECAUSE THE INTERACTION MAY BE VIRTUAL OR HISTORICAL

~Moss

drags and hip accents. I love to use full body vibrations, a torso that articulates and shimmies, with pelvic isolations and blazing footwork. I recognize the street and the stage, the individual and the collective. Jazz requires interaction, but it can be performed as a solo because the interaction may of course be virtual or historical. It can speak to the past, to the moment and to tomorrow. In the final analysis, for me, the jazz idiom is about storytelling. As the anthropologist and dancer Pearl Primus said, “Dance is strong magic.”

—

In February 2018 I attended the

Collegium for African Diaspora Dance conference at Duke University. The theme was “Dance Black Joy: Global affirmations and defiance.” The conference was a rallying cry, calling people to use dance “to overcome, to resist and to rebuild.” Yes, I am jazzed by that intention and anxious to continue digging into the jazz form and its many roots and blossoms. The scholar Tommy DeFrantz added that the conference theme was intended to encourage people to dance “toward joy,” while still being activists. This was right up my alley. DeFrantz’s idea filled my eyes, ears and heart.

During my sabbatical, I’ve been thinking about social justice, about decentring privilege (yup, check yours) and bringing a greater range of dance styles into view and into institutions of higher education by drawing attention to their absence within curricula. As a faculty member in dance at the University of Calgary, I would like to see the academe include forms like vernacular jazz, house dance, breaking, hip hop, capoeira, tap and any number of global traditions. I see a future where all spaces of higher education respect the functions, philosophies and ways of being and knowing related to these practices. I hope we can recognize that we might be promoting an erroneous view by omitting dance styles that are not Eurocentric.

A good way for us to check our privilege is to deconstruct the dance technique hierarchy and then, in turn, appreciate the worth of so-called street art, especially in higher education studies. I think it’s important to recognize the contributions of Black people and Black culture. We need to name it, unpack it and reflect on the meaning. By teaching these forms, we honour the contributions of the innovators and begin to appreciate difference and de-escalate misunderstanding.

Simply put, it’s good for everyone to run this material through the mind-body system.

To this end, I have taken students into the field with me to various sites on the planet to study the roots of jazz and contemporary urban dance. The opportunity to embody the dances of Guinea, to study Carnival tradition in Trinidad and Cuba or contemporary and hip hop culture in Uganda were all powerful. To be embedded in a culture and bring into focus the people producing art is powerful pedagogy that continues to enrich my jazz practice.

—

When dancing jazz, I like to shift into highway gear, rolling along for hours. Then there’s the other approach, a flash of the spirit, short and sweet. I learned how to flash my spirit and move into warp speed when in Senegal and Guinea. The solos are short and sweet, and whether you’re in the nightclub or in the street, solos blast hot and fierce and then you leave the circle with an uptown saunter. In Guinea it is the échauffement that can lift me up and off the floor. The drummers play a dense double-time feel, so energizing it cannot be denied. You’re easily swept up into hyperspeed. I’ve spent many years cataloguing and gathering the many steps associated with the particular rhythms of the Senegambia region, and I can access these steps within the tradition. But what I enjoy most these days, present tense, is accessing these dances to improvise broadly and boldly. Afro-house music is an especially satisfying soundtrack, even

though it’s so far from jazz. Even so, the jazz idiom at its core is about energy, emotion and humanity.

I identify as a Canadian, a maker, a creator, a teacher, an engaged citizen and a dancer. Even at my advanced age, I want to dance. I need to dance. I believe it’s necessary to stay in motion. But what do I have to say? I’m concerned about our carbon footprint and the future of our youth. I’m thinking about those living under the poverty line and their opportunity to live well. Dancing bodies are unique, wise and they should not be silenced. Jazz dance and music have a tradition of addressing the issues. Dance and dancing can be potent. But in the face of all that is going on, is it enough to make art?

I’m thinking about my sabbatical year coming to an end, about how I can mark the next stage of my career. I want to embrace a more positive tone and an agenda that speaks to the empowerment of others. Don’t laugh! Overstated and a smidge lofty? Too far-reaching? But there it is – jazz philosophy?!

Through the ontological examination of diverse dance forms, I believe we can shape the future with a focus on plurality.

Considering the institutions’ offerings, the pedagogies, the concerts and the community dance classes, we might come to better understand the harmfulness of exclusion and discrimination. Let’s decolonize our education system, our media, and make room for others to use their unique embodied creativity.

The traditional academic sabbatical research leave is a time to retreat and drill down, pull out actionable plans

– to dream, innovate or shift gears. In the early eighties, Vicki Adams Willis, longtime collaborator and founder of Decidedly Jazz Danceworks (DJD), had recently returned from her sabbatical, and she voiced her concern over the radical change and disappearing embodied history of jazz dance. Decidedly Jazz Danceworks was born out of this reflection! We were mostly studying modern jazz while the authentic and classic jazz approach was waning in the studio and on the stage. Vicki took a small group of interested students to New York City, and the jazz research began. We studied with many jazz artists in numerous forms, and Vicki set me on my ethnographic research path.

Through jazz, I found my tribe, created fiercely and made a home in a city far from my family. Jazz music and dance created connectedness and a sense of belonging. The action of co-founding DJD was intentional and, as it turns out, a powerful act. At the time, I had no idea how much it was about inclusion! Over the years, many citizens of Calgary became jazz fans. On the surface it seems that the ol’ YYC, and Canada more generally, might be an inhospitable place for jazz, but it’s the opposite. Don’t make assumptions is the lesson of the day.

Read Moss’s interview with Catherine

Hayward >> thedancecurrent.com/

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