New Orleans: The Land of a Thousand (Jazz) Dances

A Stomp by any other name would sound as sweet! I have wondered why certain song titles include the following descriptions: Stomp, Breakdown, Boogie, Ramble, Jump, Jubilee, Shuffle, Cakewalk, Swing, Strut, etc. Of course, a whole genre of music refers to Blues, but traditional jazz also has a lot of what were popular dance steps contained in the titles. New Orleans Jazz began in the early 1910s combining brass band marches, French quadrilles, beguine, ragtime, and blues with a collective polyphonic improvisation and an added element from Cuban/Spanish cultures. Its many characteristics include both syncopation and swing rhythms; a walking bass (a rising/falling sequence of notes); glissandi (finger slides from one note to another) and instrumental breaks. At the most recent 50th Jazz & Heritage Festival, Lars Edegran’s New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra performed a stomp and drummer Benny Amon, literally (and loudly!) stomped his right foot on the wooden floor at a particular moment. Had there been dancers also performing, you would have seen them stop their glide across the floor and “stomp” at the appropriate pause. So, many of the song titles indicated a particular style of dance or musical passage. Browsing through a dictionary of musical terms reveals the intended messages that the writers and lyricists wanted to express to the listeners. In some tunes the dance name is in t