Breakdancing as the Blues

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.

Abstractions of Jazz

“Profoundly naive; unimaginably wise. They were spectacular. Everything I’d hope to find in the system…biodigital jazz, man.” — Kevin Flynn

Wynton Marsalis defined jazz as improvisation, the blues, and swing. But what does that mean, really?

Improvisation is spontaneous creation. Or, as the old saying goes, “composition is slow improvisation, and improvisation is fast composition.”

Blues is a feeling. Deeply emotional, deeply comforting. Everyone has their own set of the blues.

Swing is a type of rhythm.

So jazz can be any creative remixing, of deeply familiar and deeply emotional content, done with a consistent poetic rhythm, with an emotional tone of joy.

In that sense, anything can be jazz. If you play it right.