Artist Talk with Christi Jay Wells and Brandy Smith in Conjunction with Cherokee Street Jazz Crawl
Artist Talk with Christi Jay Wells and Brandy Smith in Conjunction with Cherokee Street Jazz Crawl
Talk
In-Person
Saturday, November 4, 2023
10am CST
RSVP on Eventbrite
Artist Talk: Christi Jay Wells and Brandy Smith
Join us at The Luminary on Saturday, 11/04/23 at 10 a.m. for an artist talk with Christi Jay Wells and Brandy Smith as a part of the Cherokee Street Jazz Crawl and the N/evermore Jazz Action Summit. This event is free and open to the public. For more information on N/evermore, visit their website here.
Christi will be discussing her book: Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance. Between Beats offers a new look at the complex intersections between jazz music and popular dance over the last hundred-plus years. Wells shows how popular entertainment and cultures of social dancing were crucial to jazz music's formation and development even as jazz music came to earn a reputation as a "legitimate" art form better suited for still, seated listening.
About Christi:
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.
About Brandy:
Brandy Smith's dance journey began with swing, ballroom, and Latin styles, but it was in 2011 that she discovered her true love for the Blues. With effortless grace, she seamlessly intertwines her dance moves and DJ-ing skills, bringing soulful rhythms to life on dance floors all across the United States.
For Brandy, the blues community became more than just a dance scene; it became a place where she truly belonged. Blues dance serves as her canvas for self-expression, offering her a unique voice and a creative outlet. Brandy's artistic talents extend beyond the dance floor. Collaborating with her dance partner, Christi Jay, she contributed her artistic touch to "Between Beats," a project that beautifully reflects their shared passion for dance.
About Between Beats:
Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance offers a new look at the complex intersections between jazz music and popular dance over the last hundred-plus years. Author Christi Jay Wells shows how popular entertainment and cultures of social dancing were crucial to jazz music's formation and development even as jazz music came to earn a reputation as a "legitimate" art form better suited for still, seated listening.
Through the concept of choreographies of listening, the book explores amateur and professional jazz dancers' relationships with jazz music and musicians as jazz's soundscapes and choreoscapes were forged through close contact and mutual creative exchange. It also unpacks the aesthetic and political negotiations through which jazz music supposedly distanced itself from dancing bodies. Fusing little-discussed material from diverse historical and contemporary sources with the author's own years of experience as a social jazz dancer, it advances participatory dance and embodied practice as central topics of analysis in jazz studies. As it explores the fascinating history of jazz as popular dance music, it exposes how American anxieties about bodies and a broad cultural privileging of the cerebral over the corporeal have shaped efforts to "elevate" expressive forms such as jazz to elite status.