In the history of documenting music, Roger Tilton’s film Jazz Dance (1954) is an outstanding experimental approach to early direct cinema. By using a novel, genuinely audio-visual, non-staged, multi-angled approach to recording, the film opened up new ways to capture the vibes of the filmed event and thus turn jazz into film. This article seeks to remedy the lack of academic engagement with Jazz Dance by outlining its status as a seminal example for early direct cinema as well as documenting jazz and jazz dance. To that end, the means and techniques chosen by Tilton and his collaborators to convey the impression and vibe of jazz as well as the aesthetic approach to the combination of jazz dance and music in the film will be analysed. Furthermore, Jazz Dance will be discussed and positioned within in the larger field of documentary films that bring together jazz music and dance.
The term hybridization is becoming more and more common in scholarly literature on music. It is here used as defined in a previous text by author Holger Lund: »The term hybridization is used in its biological sense, meaning something which is a product of two different species that have been crossbred. A hybrid is something consisting of different origins, transgressing the old order of the former species to build up something new« (Lund 2011). 2 Cf. http://www.stonesthrow.com/podcast (accessed 13.4.2015). 3 Gabriel Skoog said about this irritating listening experience: »One of the pleasures of list[en]ing to hybrid genres for the first time is the bending of frame involved as we reorient ourselves in relationship to the piece« (Skoog 2012: 91).
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