Pop at the pictures: Jitterbugging

In the first of a new series, Jon Savage is trawling the archive of British Pathe newsreels to pick out pop cultural gems. He starts in the 30s with the phenomenon of jitterbugging Pathe had a long history of covering club life and dancing trends – there is an excellent series called London’s Famous Clubs and Cabarets from the mid-20s – but after swing culture arrived in Britain in the late 30s, it presented this frankly staid, pre-pop newsreel with problems of tone and explication. Swing was a souped-up refashioning of 20s hot jazz that originated in African-American culture at clubs such as Harlem’s Savoy ballroom. Its associated dance, the Lindy Hop – marked by the breakaway, when partners abandoned strict tempo and improvised – was first noted by the writer Carl van Vechten in 1928. When it crossed over to white audiences, swing’s dances were all lumped together by the media under the name “jitterbug”. Benny Goodman clearly remembered seeing his first jitterbug in 1934, when a male dancer started to go “off his conk. His eyes rolled, his limbs began to spin like a windmill in a hurricane – his attention, riveted to the rhythm, transformed him into a whirling dervish.” Jitterbugging was still a minority style in the UK before the second world war. In January 1939, Pathe bought in an American newsreel of a dance competition in Cincinnati, Ohio and entitled it Jitterbug Mania (see above). The brief English voiceover emphasises the strangeness and indeed the madness of this US import, while the original commentary introduces the style’s buzzwords: “hep cats and hep chicks”, “everything’s copasetic”, “Cincinatti’s leading rug-cutters and sharpies kick up the dust.” Swing culture became more firmly entrenched in the UK with the arrival of American GIs after 1942. At the end of 1943, Pathe produced two more films on the topic. Rhythm (see above) is an odd mixture of innovation and condescension that reflects just how bizarre American youth culture (the term was coined by the sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1942) must have seemed to British adults. Within just over two minutes, the piece cuts from a funky jazz drama to a disgruntled adult trying to shut out the noise, from the same adult, now a doctor, measuring the drummer’s heartbeat to a series of almost psychedelic electrical waves and animated diagrams. It ends with the briefest of clips showing Gene Krupa with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. There was no doubt about it, this was an alien import – a virus, almost (hence the medical, spacey feel of Rhythm) that threatened to infect British youth. What was needed was a firm hand, and that’s what we get in Jive Dance (see below) from November 1943. Walking down the stage stairs in full evening dress, dance teacher Josephine Bradley will quite clearly brook no nonsense. As Lou Praeger’s band strikes up a swing riff and the dancers begin to fling themselves around, she observes: “Well ladies and gentlemen, I think you will agree that that this is hardly a dance that will grace our ballrooms.” However “from it has evolved another dance, the jive” – and this is what Bradley and her two assistants proceed to lead us through. It’s strange to see the wildness of swing dancing approached in the style of strict tempo but the final shots, of an enthusiastic Hammersmith Palais audience, are much more like it: the exuberance of dance culture in one of its most celebrated venues. • The British Pathe archive contains 90,000 newsreels, from 1910 until the 70s. Jon Savage’s exploration of its wealth of pop material will appear on an occasional basis. Pop and rock Jazz Dance Jon Savage guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 28, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.