Frankie says that he started dancing to meet girls. It’s an easy point to lose track of.

The story of Frankie Manning is a fascinating one, and I only dare to retell it because I probably only remember the parts that either struck home when I heard him tell it or that I came to appreciate over the next couple years.

Frankie grew up in a part of New York City that shared Frankie’s home with the Savoy Ballroom. Word reached him and his friends that a lot of girls would go in there to dance, so he went up to take a look. Sure enough. A lot of girls and not enough guys. Something more than one person has since observed.

Now, it’s the next part of this story that has stayed with me since I heard Frankie tell his version about 7 years ago. Dancing (let’s call it partner dancing to distinguish it from ballet and modern dance) is dancing, but only show business makes money. When the operators of the Savoy were looking for ways to build their crowds, they decided to pick some of the better looking dancers to form a group that would prime the crowd. Perhaps a good analogy would be high school dances (at least, in my day), where girls more or less stood on one side of the room and guys stood on the other. The girls wanted to dance—badly, but the guys didn’t—badly. Mostly, I think, it had to do with not knowing how, something that changed quite a bit when hopping around more or less in time with the music came to be called partner dancing. In traditional partnering (yes, there are definitely alternatives these days), the guy initiates the dance (picks the girl), and then “leads” throughout the dance. ‘Leading’ means: now we go this way, now we go that, here we do this, here we do that.

That’s a big burden on a guy. And remember—all he wanted to do in the first place was meet girls. This is the price.

As with all things in life, some folks pick up a skill like this more quickly than do other folks. Frankie was one of the lucky ones, and it came quickly to him. Which is not to say that he didn’t work at it. It is my understanding that he developed the technique of throwing his female partner around in the air while dancing his style of swing, and he tells his audience that they had to use a mattress until the moves became sufficiently predictable. I almost wrote ‘safe’, but I think we know better than that.

But then something unintended happened. The group that had been formed to prime the crowd and get them dancing suddenly became a show in itself. It became more interesting (probably, to the guys!) to watch these “pros” dance than to do it yourself.

And on the stage, something similar was happening. If you’ve heard some early Ellington, you know how fundamental and powerful early swing music is. From a modern perspective, there are a couple other interesting facts. Early swing music is not marked by solos, and early swing music seldom has a vocalist. What happened to music at the Savoy and elsewhere was that the purpose of the music (to accompany dancing) got lost, and more human tendencies began to emerge.

Regarding the band itself, dance music isn’t very interesting for musicians to play. It’s great for us listeners and dancers, of course. It is, after all, strongly and simply rhythmic and melodic. But that same metric and melodic nature makes the music predictable (yes!), and when something is predictable it’s not creative. No listener to Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” can sit still for long, nor could you keep a group of dancers from getting started when that pounding repetitive theme begins—who knows, perhaps the world’s most popular swing dance tune. But how much fun can it be to play? The first time, sure. How about the 100^th time? The 1,000^th? I’ve heard it that many times, and I’ve loved each time. But I wasn’t playing it.

And something else changed with the Savoy bands. Frankie says that Ella Fitzgerald was quite a dancer when she started singing with a band. Vocalists were window dressing for big bands. They came in long after a piece had begun, sang a few bars, then sat down and let the band finish. But that didn’t last long. People focus on a voice, and that focus eventually gives the vocalist ideas—hey, they’re here for me! Not at all different from the interesting phenomenon that movie stars think their opinions on non-movie subjects mean more than those of the average fan. But the fans, too, will grant this. And so the momentum goes, and we get further and further away from that repetitive, melodic force we call dance music.

I saw the same thing happen when I began learning partner dancing. You see the teachers doing, say, some nice swing move. That’s where you want to be, you think. And then you start to learn. Left foot here, then right foot. No, hold back, then quick-quick. No, not that way, over here. And on and on. The goal is simple enough: at some point, you’ll lift your head, and you’ll be doing what your teachers were doing. Keep your eyes closed and dream on.

Even when you learn some things, they get boring after you do them for a while. And remember—it’s your job as the lead to come up with new things.

So, when do we get back to the girls? I tried talking with my partner (often, someone you don’t know), and that has the interesting effect of diminishing the dance moves. You’d have to be awfully good to be able to talk and at the same time introduce variations, new moves, and just plain dance interest. In my observation, most people stick to the dancing. And that leads to more concentration on skill and more on creativity, and the gap grows wider between the haves and the have-nots. Just like the rest of life, I guess.

I encountered this session with Frankie Manning and his son, Chas Young, much too early in my dancing life to get much from it. But the nice effect of this was that I dropped out of the class and took these photographs.

People get very serious about dancing, and as I’ve suggested above, there is much reason for this, at least for leads. You can’t lead something you don’t know anything about. And the act of learning that something can take you far away from the effortless encounter with a member of the opposite sex you might have imagined while watching others.

A most remarkable dance instructor—Richard Powers—has developed an approach to dance and its instruction that helps to bring partner dancing closer to its roots. He calls this approach ‘jammix’. I first encountered this term and style of dance/instruction when Melissa and I attended what I believe was the last Ft Warden dance camp sponsored by Seattle’s Living Traditions. That event is worth a whole book in itself, but I remember that I accompanied Melissa to what she thought was going to be Richard Powers’ class in vintage dance (and in which guise she’d first made Richard’s acquaintance). I’m sure I just went along without intending to join the vintage group (I was too new to dance, generally, and not enamored of the vintage concept, anyway). For some reason, Richard cancelled the vintage stuff, and substituted this new thing he’d been developing called Jammix. Some background.

Richard teaches at Stanford, which has a lot of students who aren’t in the humanities, if you know what I mean. ‘Geeks’, they’re sometimes called. Geeks often like music that is not exactly popular. Yes, it can be described as “young”, but “popular?” No. Punk rock, for example, was a geek favorite, but it was not the music of a majority of young people. So, do geeks dance? Not so you can tell. Richard developed two (last I heard) steps, one from a two-step (someone told me), and the other from basic waltz (an amazing amount of music is in ¾ time). These steps are as simple as dancing can be, but of course partner dancing means more than just lifting your feet and putting them down again, and that’s where the instruction comes in. But here’s the kicker: there is no music to which you cannot dance with one of these two steps. None. In that dance camp class, we danced to French techno pop, polka, and dozens of other things (later, he even borrowed a couple of my Seattle Ska band records). It simply doesn’t make any difference what the music is, as long as it has a steady beat.

Richard lets it be known that “have gig, will travel,” and encourages people to organize Jammix sessions all over the world, then invite him to provide the instruction. Melissa took the bait, and set about organizing a Jammix session for early 1997. The hope was that all the Microsoft geeks would flock to this thing, as in the spirit with which it had come to life. But I don’t think we reached many of those people, and most of the people who came to the class and subsequent dance were long-time members of the Seattle dance community.

There was an interesting side story to this very interesting long weekend. Richard and his able teaching and dance partner Angela Amarillas had been invited up to Seattle that weekend to teach members of the Pacific Northwest Ballet some swing steps. This event had been of particular interest to Ms Amarillas, as she had begun her own dance life in ballet. We should have made a video of Richard and Angela describing their experience teaching world-class ballet dancers how to swing. Better yet, we should have filmed the actual event. I’m sure they tell that story still, and have even more chapters to add.

I have another debt to Jammix. This is how it reminded me of what partner dancing is all about.

At that Ft Warden Jammix class, Richard introduced the simple waltz step I’ve alluded to. Something about that puzzled Melissa, and after class she talked to Richard about her question. To clarify his point, he put on a waltz tune, and proceeded to illustrate this point and that, often by dancing with Melissa. I saw that a young woman had stayed behind, and was listening to Richard’s explanation. “Shall we practice?” I asked. “Sure.” And we did. I remember that the step was not intuitive, and especially not to those who know other waltz steps (it’s my only claim to dance competence), so it took us a bit to get the hang of it. But then we did. And that song seemed to go on forever, and that wasn’t long enough. After about a minute, we two people had become one organism. With four legs, but behaving as if two. It’s important to note that there wasn’t anything sexual about this experience, although this wouldn’t have happened had she been a man (I have danced with men and know). I just know that it was the most powerful experience I was to have dancing. It was incredible.

When the song finished, I think we fell down. It had not been an effort to sustain that state of magic, but with the music over, our feet touched the ground, and the ground couldn’t hold us. We who had soared so high.

I thanked her and said goodbye. I never knew her name, and don’t recall whether I ever saw her again that week. By the most amazing coincidence, she came to a social gathering I happened to be at in Seattle some months later. I was curious to see whether she remembered me. “We danced once,” I said upon introduction. “I know,” she smiled.