All that Jazz

Some musicians are dancers, and Chick [Webb] was. You can dance with a lot of things besides your feet. Billy Strayhorn was another dancer-in his mind. He was a dance-writer. Chick Webb was a dance-drummer who painted pictures of dances with his drums. Way back, at the Cotton Club, we were always tailoring orchestrations to fit the dances. If you listen to the figures in some of Strayhorn's pieces, like "U.M.M.G.", those are dances-tap dances maybe-and you can't mistake what they essentially are. The reason why Chick Webb had such control, such command of his audiences at the Savoy Ballroom, was because he was always in communication with the dancers and felt it the way they did.

-Duke Ellington-
*as quoted in Dixon Gottschild's Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era*

I was never convinced that the melting pot was an appropriate metaphor for the way in which people ought to come together....Even talk these days about a mosaic, to me, is still a little bit too static. My ideal of a democratic community is a jazz band. The reason being, of course, because it observes individuality; it allows the interplay between the individual and the community without that community gobbling up the individual or the individual somehow seizing center-stage. And one must be always open, listening to the unpredictable-especially given the moods of the musicians at a particular moment-but you always have your eye on something larger than you: the artistic achievement...that empowers other ordinary people...to enact, not simply allude to, a certain democratic sensibility.

-Cornel West-
*as quoted in Dixon Gottschild's Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era*