Biography
Recognized as the most senior jazz critic still working today, Stanley Dance has long championed musicians associated with swing and mainstream jazz. He originated the term “mainstream” during the 1950s to identify the stylistic territory occupied by players positioned between dixieland and bebop. His earliest jazz writing appeared in France for Jazz Hot in 1935. After relocating to the United States in 1937, he contributed to virtually every major jazz publication, among them Down Beat, Metronome, Jazz Journal from 1948 to 1976, and Jazz Times beginning in 1980, as well as the New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Review. Over the years he also produced numerous recording sessions, most prominently for Felsted in the 1950s and additionally for Columbia, Black Lion, and RCA, thereby exerting a quiet yet tangible influence on jazz history. In 1964, for instance, he persuaded Earl Hines to perform at two New York concerts that revived the pianist’s career. Dance’s most enduring legacy lies in his books, notably The World Of Duke Ellington, The World Of Swing, The World Of Earl Hines, and The World Of Count Basie; he further aided the autobiographies of Dicky Wells and Charlie Barnet. These volumes preserve extensive interviews conducted with leading swing-era figures only a short time before most of them died. Dance maintained a particularly close association with Ellington, assisting the bandleader with his memoirs, and supplied liner notes for countless recordings featuring Ellington, Basie, Hines, Jimmy Lunceford, and their sidemen. His Jazz Times columns have frequently provoked debate because of his aversion to bop, yet they have consistently promoted the idioms he admires. His wife, Helen Oakley Dance, who supervised small-group sessions by Ellington’s sidemen in the 1930s, has likewise written for numerous periodicals and produced a biography of T-Bone Walker.