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The history of jazz dance is intimately tied to the history of jazz music. Collectively, as jazz expression with common histories and shared aesthetic characteristics, their entwined history from emancipation to the 1970s is complex. Their parallel histories reveal a multiplicity of aesthetic approaches and interactions, and a fluidity of cultural, musical, and dance identities. Thus, jazz history is a landscape of evolving meanings, values, ideas, sounds, movements, contestations, contradictions, pluralities, and multiple constructions of “what is jazz.” In this chapter, the historical discussion of jazz and its West African roots is framed through an examination of relevant jazz dance and music history literature, as well as oral history interviews. This discussion and analysis offers a broad historical overview intended to introduce the sweep of jazz dance and music history.

The A&R man became a record producer with the development of magnetic tape (a spoil of World War II) and the introduction of the vinyl long-playing record by Columbia Records in 1948. Producers could capture on tape—for reproduction and sale on records—jazz that had routinely happened for many years only on various stages. When recording technology caught up with the actual practice of improvising musicians, jazz discovered an ideal form in the "album." George Avakian's visionary work with Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Erroll Garner, Buck Clayton, and Dave Brubeck realized what could be done with the new format and technology. The productions of Milt Gabler, Bob Weinstock, Esmond Edwards, Don Schlitten Teo Macero, Bob Thiele, Orrin Keepnews, Nesuhi Ertegun, Creed Taylor, Lester Koenig, Nat Hentoff ushered in a golden age for jazz.

Recording jazz onto multitrack tape meant that, while music continued to be captured onto tape in studios, albums could be constructed in postproduction: analogous to the way movies were shot on soundstages and assembled in editing rooms. Some musicians—especially Miles Davis and his jazz fusion bands—directed improvisations in the recording studio and left the task of assembling albums to their producers. Audiences for such albums heard, not studio games of cut 'n' paste, but tracks that resembled the turn-on-a-dime musical performances they heard in concert—performances which imitated techniques devised in postproduction. Enabling the naiveté of this audience is an overarching truth: jazz production almost always uses available technologies to ensure that in-the-moment performances are recorded (and, later, reproduced) as perfectly as possible.

When digital audio workstations (DAWs) do not multiply recording options to unthinkable levels of over-choice, they have simplified and automated tasks that were exceedingly difficult and time consuming to execute on analog tape. But they have informed jazz production most profoundly in the smallest sorts of ways. Fixing the little stuff that once marred, otherwise stellar, performances is now very quick and easy. A number of jazz recordings discussed in this chapter were not recorded digitally, and when they were, many of their producers merely treated digital tape and hard drives as the new, perhaps "improved," analog tape. Much of the time, in the world of jazz production a potentially revolutionary technology is just added to—and conceptualized in terms of–what was already available.

Production before the advent of magnetic tape—in the era of 78-RPM records—emphasized "pre-production." A&R men (short for "artists and repertoire") chose artists to record, and they paired songs from the publishing firms of Tin Pan Alley with artists. The A&R work of Milt Gabler (at Commodore and Decca Records) and John Hammond and George Avakian (at Columbia) is exemplary. Gabler organized a series of jam sessions, which he recorded. Avakian produced Chicago Jazz (1940), the first jazz "album" of original material. As part of their popular music divisions the major labels—Columbia, Decca, and RCA Victor—record and market jazz. A number of specialty labels emerge: Commodore, Prestige, Contemporary, Verve, Blue Note, Atlantic, Riverside, and Savoy. Though dependent on pressing plants owned by the majors, they reflect the production philosophies of the connoisseurs who founded and owned them.