Stanley Dance

Stanley Frank Dance (15 September 1910 in Braintree, Essex – 23 February 1999 in Vista, California) was a British jazz writer, business manager, record producer, and historian of the Swing era. He was personally close to Duke Ellington over a long period, as well as many other musicians; because of this friendship Dance was in a position to write "official" biographies. Over his career, his priority was advocating for the music of black ensembles performing sophisticated arrangements, based on Swing-era dance music.

Early life Dance was born in England to a successful Essex tobacco merchant in 1910. As a youth, he claimed he was "fortunate" to have been sent to boarding-school at Framlingham College, where he first encountered American recordings of bands fronted by Jelly Roll Morton and Benny Moten, among others. After finishing his sixth-form year, he was encouraged by his father encouraged to continue his education at Oxford University. But Dance, who (while good at mathematics and an excellent French-speaker) was not a willing student, chose instead to enter the family business.

Jazz interests (1930–45) While working in Essex, Dance continued to pursue his interest in music, listening to radio broadcasts and attending jazz concerts in London. He soon learned of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington through Lawrence Wright's music newspaper Melody Maker (which had begun publication in 1926). Dance chose to focus his enthusiasm on the music of black bands. He started writing opinion pieces about the jazz scene for Hugues Panassié's French-language magazine Jazz Hot in 1935, modelling his articles on those found in Melody Maker and The Gramophone that were written by John Hammond. was assigned to the Royal Observer Corps in East Anglia, where his business skills must have helped organise the mostly-volunteer staff. The war extended what was to be a temporary service into nine years, a period in which his opportunity to listen to black American bands was curtailed, due to both limited leave and the effects of rationing on record-production. He certainly missed the start of Bebop, which developed during the war and a recording-musicians' strike in the US. But he found Helen Oakley when the American OSS assigned her to London late in the war.

Postwar Britain (1946–59) Dance and Oakley married in January 1947, In 1958, Decca's Felsted Records commissioned Dance to produce a series of New York recordings of Coleman Hawkins, Cozy Cole/Earl Hines, Billy Strayhorn/Johnny Hodges, Buddy Tate, and several others, which were released under the collective title "Mainstream Jazz".

In 1961, he published Jazz Era: The Forties, and in 1974 his oral history The World of Swing. He worked for a year as the jazz critic for the New York Herald Tribune, which paid poorly but taught him to "write to deadline". He also helped Ellington's son Mercer (executor of his father's estate) deal with the large number of unissued recordings, and co-wrote Mercer's biography of his father. In 1970, Ellington wrote: Stanley is well informed about my activities and those of my associates. He has been a part of our scene for a long time, maybe longer than he cares to remember. He and his wife Helen are the kind of people it is good to have in your corner, the kind of people you don't mind knowing your secrets. In other words they are friends – and you don't have to be careful with friends. He served as book editor for Jazz Times.

Dance died of pneumonia at 88 years old on 23 February 1999, at the Rancho Bernardo Remington Rehabilitation Health Care Center. His grave is located in Mission San Luis Rey Cemetery.

Influence and legacy Dance was famously characterised as an opponent of Bebop and the later jazz of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Free Jazz, based largely on his columns in Jazz Journal and in Jazz Times. His biographers (including Porter, Scott Yanow, and Steve Voce), view him rather as an energetic advocate of the music he loved and worked with. Dance's own perspective (from a 1995 radio interview) was:

one of the things that was really very important for jazz ... is the fact that people were dancing to it. And the musicians all liked that, most of them liked it because you know... it isn't quite the same thing as an audience sitting down ... of course Rock 'n Roll comes along and takes away — the kids are dancing to Rock n' Roll, partly because jazz had become so ambitious that it wasn't very danceable.

Dance's recording efforts ensured an expanded catalogue of recordings from his chosen era, and continued the careers of several notable musicians. His books and unpublished archives offer a latter-day historian documentary insight into the world of these black jazz musicians while maintaining some of the perspective of an outsider. Dance was a significant contributor to the development of critical jazz journalism and jazz history over more than 60 years.

Partial bibliography Jazz Era the Forties (The Roots of Jazz) (Da Capo Press, 1961) The World of Count Basie (Da Capo Press, 1985) The World of Duke Ellington (Da Capo Press) The World of Earl Hines with Earl Hines (Da Capo Paperback, March 1983) The World of Swing: An Oral History of Big Band Jazz with introduction by Dan Morgenstern (Da Capo Press; Diane Publishing Company re-edition 2003)