Christi Jay Wells is assistant professor of musicology at Arizona State University's School of Music, Dance, and Theatre and affiliate faculty with ASU's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. They have also been an active practitioner of social blues and jazz dancing for nearly two decades and have given numerous dance workshops and dance history lectures locally, nationally, and internationally. Their research on jazz music in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s has received the Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award and Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music.
Finally! A compelling account of the movements of jazz across bodies and social circumstances. Crafted with care, and brimming with original archival research, Between Beats demonstrates how social dance operates at the center of concerns including commerce, race, class, white supremacy, nostalgia, and gender. Wells offers an urgent and entirely necessary affirmation of jazz along its unmistakable music-dance continuum. * Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and Professor of Dance, Duke University * This creative and inspiring book rethinks jazz history through the collective consciousness of Black vernacular dance. If today jazz is 'America's classical music,' it pushed its way into concert and lecture halls by being distanced from the dance cultures that birthed it. With this remarkable study, Christi Jay Wells gives 'body' to jazz studies through a stunning and accessible critique of jazz historiography, scholarly omissions, and racial ideologies. When the music starts, Between Beats asks jazz studies, 'shall we dance?' * Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Pianist, Composer, and Music Historian, and Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania *