“What’s really exciting about the scene today is that it’s growing itself again, there’s a massive young audience out there,” says Paul Murphy, London’s original jazz dance DJ and founder of the Jazz Room Records label. Murphy is correct: More than three decades on from its heyday, the jazz dance scene remains exciting and strong, with undiscovered records being played alongside contemporary jazz for a new generation of dancers.
The roots of jazz dance can be traced back to the mid to late 1970s when teenagers across the UK created their own fanatical scene. “For me, it begins in a club in Birmingham I used to go to every Monday night called Chaplins with a DJ by the name of Graham Warr,” says DJ Colin Curtis. Founder of the Colin Curtis Presents label and compiler of the Jazz Dance Fusion series, he brought jazz dance to Manchester through clubs like Rafters, Rufus, and Smarties. “What I saw at Chaplins was the evolution of the balletic style of jazz dance,” Curtis continues. “These guys were moving on the dancefloor like nothing I had seen before. And that style became prevalent in the Midlands and North West. That is what I would call the first phase of jazz dancing.”
Far removed from the graceful balletic style of these dancers was the so-called “fusion” dancing at The Electric Ballroom in London. With their lightning-fast footwork and furious spins, these young dancers favored the heavier end of jazz fusion played by Murphy, who plucked records like Baaska & Scavelli’s “Get Off The Ground” and Jerry Gonzalez’s “Evidence” from obscurity. “It was amazing in that jazz room—the intensity of the music was incredible as was the dancing, and if you wanted to be someone there you really had to be able to hold your own,” says Perry Louis, founder of the Jazzcotech dance troupe and the long running Shiftless Shuffle club session in London.
Murphy first made his name at a session known as JAFFAS (Jazz and Funk Funk and Soul) held in a faded ballroom called the Horseshoe on Tottenham Court Road in London’s West End, and launched Jazz Room Records label in 2019 with Hugo Heredia’s Mananita Pampera, from which “Al Bebbe Guia” was taken. The track was a “lost masterpiece that was released on an obscure French label [Côte D’Azur] in the 1970s,” says Murphy. “A handful of copies turned up in various jazz shops in London where I snapped one up and played to the embryonic jazz dance scene.”
One of those dancers at JAFFAS was Perry Louis. “With Paul Murphy, the music became harder and heavier. He started playing incredible fusion stuff like Terumasa Hino’s “Merry Go Round’ alongside Barry Miles’s ‘Magic Theatre’ and ‘White Heat’ and mixing it up with Afro-Cuban,” he says. “The energy, ferociousness, and quality of the music he played was incredible—and that is when the dancing changed with much faster footwork and higher energy.”
In 1981, Murphy opened Fusion Records, a record store in Clerkenwell, North London, that specialized in obscure jazz records from warehouses across the world. “I bought straight from the USA, Germany, even Finland with records on labels like Love Records, home of Olli Ahvenlahti, and Spain with Jayme Marques, that type of thing,” he says. An old Fusions Jazz chart in Snowboy’s book From Jazz Funk & Fusion to Acid Jazz: The History of The UK Jazz Dance Scene features heavy jazz dance records like Azar Lawrence’s incredible “Forces of Nature” and the aforementioned “Merry Go Round” by Terumasa Hino. These were some of the records that Murphy would pass on to a young Gilles Peterson when he took over as DJ at Electric Ballroom in 1984.
A regular DJ at all-dayer parties across the UK in the late ’70s, Colin Curtis was one of the first to introduce heavy fusion bombs like “Forces of Nature” to area jazz dancers, and his Tuesday sets at Manchester venue Berlin—frequented by Factory Records groups and closely associated with balletic dance troupe The Jazz Defektors—set the parameters for the genre from the mid-’80s onward. “I would play sets that were four or five hours long, introducing jazz from bebop and bossa nova to mambos and vocal jazz,” says Curtis.
One of the faces in the crowd was Giles Peterson, the legendary British DJ who, as fate would have it, ended up taking jazz dance global with his Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Something party at Dingwalls in Camden Town, North London. Opening in 1987 with Peterson and Patrick Forge as resident DJs, Dingwalls brought many of the tracks that had appeared on Peterson’s influential Jazz Juice compilation series of the mid ‘80s to clubs all around the world, from Giant Step in New York and The Fez in Bari, Italy, to The Mojo Club in Hamburg, Germany and The Room in Shibuya, Tokyo.
Fast forward to today, and jazz dance is thriving, with Shiftless Shuffle in London, Come Sunday in Birmingham, Out to Lunch in Nottingham, the aforementioned Dingwalls, and parties in Berlin keeping the scene’s lifeblood fresh. At the same time, sessions like Love is Everywhere (hosted by Tina Edwards, who also drops many a jazz dance track on her Soho Radio show), Rhys & Sam’s Here on Earth community parties, and the Apricot Ballroom parties in Sheffield with Ashley Grimshaw and friends are attracting a new generation of dancers. And it’s not just in the UK that jazz dance is evolving. Some of the numerous sessions across the globe include Boppin Jive and Steppin Jazz in Tokyo (continuing the long tradition of jazz dance in Japan); Marina Pravkina’s JazzBetween in Barcelona; TG Gorton/Nerstylist’s Rebirth Jazz sessions in San Francisco; and Y.U.K.I.K.O. aka Legitimate Groove’s parties in Chicago “What I love about the new scene is how they don’t follow the rules,” says Murphy. “They get down how they feel, have their own style, and they listen to things in a different way. Which is how it should be.”
The dancer’s baton is also being handed down to a new generation, such as Shiftless Shuffle regular Masumi Endo. “Shiftless Shuffle is important to me beyond words,” she says. “IZM, a jazz teacher in Japan, took two of us students to Shiftless on a four-day trip to London. It was the first time I had seen a real jazz dance floor. Everyone was connected to the music and their bodies, and their souls were shining. I went back to the hotel and cried because I was so happy.”
This life-changing event led Masumi to move to London, where she now runs Footnotes, a community organization supporting young dancers who’ve recently broken out into the UK jazz dance scene; her sessions have taken her as far as Taiwan and Seoul, where the scene is gaining popularity. “It is interesting because different countries, regions, teams, people, and events have slightly different dance styles and musical directions for jazz dance,” she says. “What they all have in common is that there is real heat on the jazz dance floor. Everyone is generating their own power, connecting with the music, the people, and themselves.”
What also makes the jazz dance scene so exciting and fresh today is the way DJs search both for undiscovered records made many years ago and new tracks that work for their dancers. Here are some releases that have continued lighting up floors across the world over the last few years.
One of the most important London jazz dance parties in the ‘90s was Adrian Gibson and Perry Louis’s Messin’ Around, immortalized on this 2010 compilation, which provides an easy introduction to contemporary jazz dance. Don’t miss “Hi-Fly Stomp,” a 2008 gem from German bassist Jerker Kluge and saxophonist Florian Riedl’s The Hi Fly Orchestra; Hironobu Jyounai & The Group’s take on Fred Johnson’s rare vocal jazz track “A Child Runs Free”; or Kenichiro Nishihara’s gorgeous modal piece “Nebulosa.”
Thanks to a series of mid-’90s compilations like Blue Brazil (Blue Note In A Latin Groove), jazz dance classics like Mandrake Som’s ”Berimbau” and Joyce’s “Aldeia De Ogum”—heretofore largely unavailable—can finally be acquired without breaking the bank. One of the other essential compilations of the time, Friends from Rio was conceived and produced by Far Out label owner Joe Davis, and pays tribute to the musicians who inspired him to travel to Brazil in his teens. The series was revived in 2014 with this installment, which supplements jazz dance standards like Jorge Ben’s ”Mas Que Nada” with newer compositions by Alex Malheiros and Daniel Maunick.
Given Colin Curtis’s reputation as a jazz dance pioneer, it’s hard to believe he wasn’t given a proper compilation until 2018. Colin Curtis presents Jazz Dance Fusion excavates deep cuts from the Muse label archives. The label, founded in 1972 by producer Joe Fields, who had previously worked for the famous jazz labels Prestige and Verve, was as fertile as it was diverse, and a godsend when it came to keeping dancers happy. “When I came across Muse, it was like ‘Wow, what’s going on here?” Curtis says. “Almost everything you bought had something of note, particularly from 1979 to the early ‘80s.” From the Brazilian stylings of Dom Um Romao’s”‘Ponteio” to the vocal-driven grooves of Mark Murphy’s “Empty Faces,” Curtis’s collection covers all the bases.
Featuring jazz dance and fusion from across the globe, these compilations encapsulate how Curtis’s Worldwide FM radio shows solidified his influential status among the current generation of artists. “I’ve always said look to the future but always respect the past,” he says. “Now on my Jazz Dance Fusion radio show, I probably play 60-70% new music.” This 26-track collection encapsulates his desire to push the scene forward, spotlighting the Latin jazz of Canadian saxophonist Jane Bunnett & Maqueque and modern jazz funk of Leeds-based group JD73’s ElecTrio, among others.
Over the past six years, Jazz Room Records has reissued some of the most sought-after dancefloor jazz records; Argentinian keyboardist Carlos Franzetti’s Graffiti is one such release. “It’s a superb, jazz-flavored Latin funk soul album recorded in 1977 by Franzetti when he was a struggling musician trying to get his first breaks in a tough New York Jazz scene,” Murphy explains. Originally released on the American label Guiness Records, best known for the cult soul and jazz funk albums by Formula 1 and Newban, Graffiti was picked up by the DJs in London’s early jazz dance scene, where “Cocoa Funk” became a must-have cut, eventually appearing on Soul Jazz Records’ seminal re-issue series London Jazz Classics.
The Colin Curtis Presents label began in 2021 with remixes of Gilles Peterson and Jean-Paul Maunick aka Bluey’s Str4ta project. It has become an important platform for contemporary jazz dance with Curtis working with artists such as Glenn Worthington’s GeeW project (check their inspired version of Rose Royce’s “Still in Love” from Volume 4). Here we find The Earthsouls (Born74, ONJ, and Mark Paul Norton) dropping a serious EP that mixes contemporary jazz funk with broken beat.
The Tokyo-based ensemble Copa Salvo continues the long tradition of Japanese groups making waves on the UK jazz dance scene, along with Osaka-based Indigo Jam Unit (who also released an album on Jazz Room in collaboration with Colin Curtis). “This album is like finding some ‘60s Latin record that’s all descargas, totally smoking heavy percussion, pounding piano, driving basslines, and just the right touch of horns—served up with plenty of jazzy currents throughout,” says Murphy.
In 1987, during a visit to London, Shuya Okino caught Gilles Peterson manning the boards for one of his famous jazz sessions at The Wag Club in Soho. Inspired by what he heard, Okino started putting on parties with his brother Yoshihiro once he returned to Japan. Dubbing themselves Kyoto Jazz Massive, after a term coined by Gilles Peterson, they pivoted to production in the mid-’90s. During that same period, Okino helped open The Room in Shibuya, Tokyo; an important home of jazz dance in Japan, where jazz artists like Mondo Grosso (for whom Shuya produced) made their name. This compilation brings together unreleased KJM tracks, including a storming jazz dance version of Afronaut’s broken-beat classic “Transcend Me,” which Okino cooked up specifically for the Dingwalls crowd.
Chris Bangs, the London DJ and producer who coined the term “acid jazz” back in the late ’80s, dropped this killer album in 2024 on the label of the same name. Deeply indebted to the jazz funk of titans like George Duke (see his stellar version of his classic “My Soul”), as well as the Latin/Brazilian sounds foundational to the scene’s development across the ’80s, Dream World featured musicians from across the world including Italian trombonist Massimo Morganti, Argentine keyboardist Luciano De La Rosa, Chilean trumpeter Juan Pi Salvo, and saxophonist Fabio Tiralongo.
What makes a jazz record a jazz dance record? It’s hard to say apart from: You know when you hear it. Such was the case when Gilles Peterson recently played a track from the St Louis-based Blvck Spvde and the Cosmos’ album Overjoyed Through The Noise. Formed as a 10-piece by Blvck Spvde during the pandemic, the group bonded over their love for the transcendent spiritual jazz of Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders, channeled extensively on “Never Be Another.” It’s a prime example of an accidental jazz dance classic.
. 00:10 / 00:58 Sounding like a recently uncovered hidden gem from a long-lost private press album out of 1970s Detroit, “We Need Freedom” was actually the work of Jake Ferguson, one-half of The Heliocentrics. Released under his moniker The Brkn Record, the killer jazz dance track was to be found on the second part of his The Architecture of Oppression series that merged music and activism. Spun by Peterson at his Dingwalls Sunday party at the We Out Here festival in 2024, “We Need Freedom” sounded perfect next to Jackie McLean’s “De I Comahlee Ah.”
Nicola Conte began to put on his Fez parties in Bari, Italy, in the early ‘90s with a group of similarly-minded bohemian friends. “Fez began just as the name of a revolving club night but became a much bigger cultural DJ and musicians’ collective,” he told Bandcamp Daily in 2023. As well as releasing his own killer jazz albums on Milan’s Schema label and on the legendary Blue Note Records, he has been a go-to producer for a range of dance floor bombs, like this collaboration with Tokyo four-piece Native. The title track from their 2007 album Prussian Blue, released on the Frankfurt label INFRACom!, is one of Giles Peterson’s favorites, and it’s easy to see why: This is a splendid Italian rework of a Japanese jazz record distributed by a German label—a testament to the borderlessness of contemporary jazz dance.
Since debuting in 2018 with a fabulous cover version of Todd Terje’s nu-disco favorite “Inspector Norse,” Japanese duo Cruisic have taken dancefloor jazz and jazz funk into some unexpected corners with versions of classic cuts.
Following their debut, Cruisic dropped this brilliant jazz dance take on 808 State’s acid house classic ”Pacific 707.” And surprisingly, it makes perfect sense with the electronic sounds and drum beats of core members Yukinari Iwata and Ryusuke Kakizawa, augmented by the glorious keys of Yuko Ichizuka and the famous sax hook interpreted by Yath from Japanese reggae group Onegram.
