A lot of people consider swing dancing to be the spiritual successor to jazz.

But consider breakdancing. Breaking:

  • Has a clear set of moves
  • Crafted to be executed at a high level (where each move makes you think “wow, how did they do that?")
  • That one curates into their own personal style
  • Performed improvisationally
  • With 4 categories of difficulty (toprock, footwork, power moves, freezes) that correspond to the 4 categories of difficulty of jazz (rhythmic, harmonic, technical, or tempo)

The process of development looks a lot like jazz (as defined by Wynton Marsalis):

  1. Improvisation as remixing (combining stuff you already know)
  2. Blues as a small set of meaningful vocabulary (as defined above)
  3. Swinging as in-time to the music

While tap and swing dance certainly have the musical lineage of jazz, breaking definitely has the blues.