[Dixielandjazz] Dirty Dancing

[Stephen Barbone]

This is a long article, but very relevent to attracting kids to the
music. The one thing the article does not say, but I do is that OKOM is
very well received as slow dance "grind" music that they are dancing to
these days. We marvel at how they dance to Basin Street Blues, or St
James Infirmary or whatever. Especially if you announce that Basis
Street was where all the whore houses were when this music was born.

Jazz was, and should be now, SEXY Music. Slow and medium bounce tunes
work. I Want A Little Girl, or Someday You'll Be Sorry, etc, especially
as a vocal.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

June 21, 2004 - NY Times

Hold On to Your Corsage. It's Dirty Dancing Time.

By ERIKA KINETZ

         When you mix girls in high-heeled shoes with boys in suits,
turn down the lights and turn up the music, what happens is now
surprisingly consistent. After years of competitive break dancing, body
slamming and solo freestyling, teenagers are dancing with each other
again.

But the couples dancing at high school proms around New York and the
rest of the country as the school year ends would be unrecognizable to
aficionados of disco and swing.

Most of the dancing is not of the cheek-to-cheek variety, a fact that
has caused controversy in some quarters. Though the dancing varies in
intensity, the partnering position of choice, back to front, is at once
less intimate and more sexual, and the couplings, even at a formal event
like the prom, constantly shift.

Called grinding, freaking or "backing it up" in its most brazen form,
this kind of dancing is not flirtation. It is war.

"It's like a battle between you and the guy," said Candy Javier, 18, a
senior at Monroe Academy for Visual Arts and Design, one of five South
Bronx high schools that had a joint prom earlier this month at the
V.I.P. Country Club in New Rochelle, N.Y. "They're pushing forward, and
you're pushing back." She shrugged. "You're not doing it," she added.
"You're just dancing."

How does a girl know if she's won the battle?

"The guy gets anxious and takes a break," Candy said with a slow smile.

Its detractors say such dancing is nothing less than simulated sex. In
the last few years, schools across the country have started to use a
variety of tools — including instructional videos, flashlights, "time
out" corners and contracts that stipulate acceptable conduct — to cool
off the dance floor.

But kids are dancing with one another in other ways, too. Music exerts a
strong influence on social dance, and the resurgence of couples dancing
has been fueled by the popularity of reggae, merengue and salsa music,
as well as by the mollifying effect R&B has had on some hip-hop.

Merengue and salsa inspire people to turn around and face each other.
Space appears between dance partners. They start flirting, an art that
is possible only with a bit of distance.

Reggae musicians, meanwhile, have rekindled an old tradition of
pantomime dances, urging their listeners to "row the boat" or "signal
the plane," which they do, in dutiful unison. And R. Kelly could be
considered the world's hippest square dance caller. "Step, step, side to
side, round and round," he says in his song "Step in the Name of Love,"
and people do it, just as R. Kelly does in the video.

It may also be easier to pair off these days because the pairings often
don't mean much, with many teens coming to their proms in groups or
alone and remaining free agents all night.

While boutonnieres and floor-length satin tend to pacify the hips, even
the toned-down dancing at proms reveals a lot about the mores of
male-female interaction.

"Social dance is about change," said Sally Sommer, a professor at
Florida State University, in Tallahassee, who specializes in the topic.
"It's terribly important because it is probably one of our best
barometers of social behaviors."

Visits this month to four proms in the New York metropolitan area and
conversations with people who went to others revealed patterns that hold
from the Upper East Side to the South Bronx and from New Rochelle to
Queens. Like music, dancing has been affected by the homogenizing forces
of MTV, VH1 and BET. It, too, cuts across class and racial boundaries.
These days, everybody — black, white, rich, poor, urban, suburban —
wants to hear hip-hop and reggae. And girls on dance floors everywhere
press their backsides into boys.

Michael Mitjans, a D.J. who has spun records at about 10 proms a year
since 1989, said that this year at the Dalton School, a private school
on the Upper East Side, "I threw on Madonna, and I lost the dance floor.
As soon as I switched back to hip-hop, it was like nothing had
happened."

Joseph LaBoy, 16, who assists Mr. Mitjans, said he was surprised by some
of the grinding he saw at Dalton's prom. "I'm from the Bronx," he said.
"I know how to do that stuff. I'm shocked to see them do it."

Officials at Dalton did not respond to phone calls and e-mail messages
seeking comment.

Mr. Mitjans said some schools asked him not to play reggae and its
Latin-influenced cousin, regeton, because they tended to inspire
particularly dirty dancing. "That stuff is real lethal for sexy
dancing," he said. D.J.'s like Mr. Mitjans help police the dance floor,
switching reggae to merengue, for example, if the dancing gets too hot.

Wining (also spelled whining or wainin), a Caribbean dance similar to
backing it up, is often done to reggae music. John Scott, 18, a senior
at the Monroe Academy for Business and Law in the South Bronx, learned
how to wine from his wife, Shera, who learned the dance back home in
Trinidad when she was 7.

"I was like, `oh yes, oh yes, this girl knows some stuff,' " John
recalled. "It's like your hips become one. I love her to lead."

Though it is sexual, the popular back-to-front configuration is, in most
cases, very impersonal. It is impossible to look at the face of your
partner, and some say they are more focused on the crowd, anyway.

Sometimes, that lack of intimacy is the point. "I think front-to-front
is more intimate," said a girl who gave her name as Gabriella. She was
sitting with her friend Liz Grobel on the penthouse balcony of Le Parker
Meridien hotel in Midtown Manhattan, taking a smoking break during the
prom for Lycée Français de New York, a French day school in Manhattan.
"At clubs, there's always the risk of them kissing you if you're front
to front." Liz added grimly, "You try to avoid that contact."

Joseph, the assistant D.J., said he didn't feel weird about what he
acknowledged was sexual contact with different girls in public. "No big
deal," he said. "I'm not doing anything bad to the girl. I'm just
dancing with her."

For John, the same movements can be sexual in one context and not in
another. He said that while he might do the same dance with other girls,
wining with Shera was special.

"It's never like with her," he said. "It's all about the emotional."

On the dance floor of the V.I.P. club, amid a dense, seething mass of
pressed curls and rhinestones, three girls faced into the center of a
circle and backed their bottoms into the laps of three boys, who grabbed
onto their hips. The girls bent forward at the waist every once in a
while and thrust their hands to the ground, grinding like that for a
while, hips high in the air. The Foreign Language Academy of Global
Studies, one of the South Bronx schools represented at the prom, this
year banned such close contact at dances held on school property.

The music switched to merengue, and suddenly, the postures in the room
shifted. People turned around to face each other. Space appeared between
dance partners. They started flirting.

The notion that sexual moves might be "just dancing," separable from sex
itself, did not go over well with the French teenagers at the Lycée
Français prom. This Upper East Side school's student body is almost
evenly divided between French, Franco-American and American students.

"In the U.S. you can dance very close, very hot with a girl," said Simon
Seroussi, a senior who arrived from France last September. "Here
everybody is dancing with everybody. In France you dance like that only
if it's your girlfriend."

Valérie Meausoone, who was wearing a strapless red dress she had picked
up in Brazil, agreed. "In France, if a guy does that, the girl is just
going to go away," she said.

Among those who still dance for love, old-fashioned cheek-to-cheek
dancing has not gone entirely out of style.

At 10:10 one evening early this month, a scream, shrill and excited,
went up from the southwest corner of the Copacabana's ballroom in
Manhattan, where New Rochelle High School was having its senior prom.
Randy Crafton, a 20-year-old who used to attend the school, had asked
Renee Webb, an 18-year-old senior, to marry him.

"I wanted everybody to see that I love her," Mr. Crafton said. "And to
show the world I'm not scared. I'm shaking right now. I'm scared I was
going to get a no."

Renee, who had said yes, giggled.

"I love her," he went on. "I didn't know what love was until I met her."

Mr. Crafton, who was wearing a baggy white suit, wrapped his arms around
Renee's waist. Renee, in a long, rhinestone-studded white gown, put her
arms around his neck. They held onto each other like that, rocking
slowly, for a long time. The dance floor was empty except for the ruin
of cast-off carnations. Above them, eight disco balls threw off big,
magic light.