Stanley Frank Dance (15 September 1910, Braintree, Essex – 23 February 1999, Vista, California) was a British jazz writer, business manager, record producer, and historian of the Swing era. He was personally close to Duke Ellington over a long period, as well as many other musicians; because of this friendship Dance was in a position to write "official" biographies. Over his career, his priority was advocating for the music of black ensembles performing sophisticated arrangements, based on Swing-era dance music.
Early life
Dance was born in England to a successful Essex tobacco merchant in 1910. As a youth, he claimed he was "fortunate" to have been sent to boarding-school at Framlingham College, where he first encountered American recordings of bands fronted by Jelly Roll Morton and Benny Moten, among others. After finishing his sixth-form year, he was encouraged by his father encouraged to continue his education at Oxford University. But Dance, who (while good at mathematics and an excellent French-speaker) was not a willing student, chose instead to enter the family business.
Jazz interests (1930–45) While working in Essex, Dance continued to pursue his interest in music, listening to radio broadcasts and attending jazz concerts in London. He soon learned of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington through Lawrence Wright's music newspaper Melody Maker (which had begun publication in 1926). Dance chose to focus his enthusiasm on the music of black bands. He started writing opinion pieces about the jazz scene for Hugues Panassié's French-language magazine Jazz Hot in 1935, modelling his articles on those found in Melody Maker and The Gramophone that were written by John Hammond.
In 1937, Dance visited New York City's jazz scene for three weeks, going to the Savoy Ballroom or similar venues in the evenings, and listening in on recording sessions during the day. He also had an introduction from Panassié to Chicago-based Canadian writer Helen Oakley. She had been hired by Irving Mills to supervise the new Variety recordings of Cab Calloway, Red Nichols, Johnny Hodges, Chu Berry, and a number of others (many associated with the Ellington Orchestra) in whom Dance was interested.
But in September 1937 Dance joined the RAF, and (due to hearing loss) was assigned to the Royal Observer Corps in East Anglia, where his business skills must have helped organise the mostly-volunteer staff. The war extended what was to be a temporary service into nine years, a period in which his opportunity to listen to black American bands was curtailed, due to both limited leave and the effects of rationing on record-production. He certainly missed the start of Bebop, which developed during the war and a recording-musicians' strike in the US. But he found Helen Oakley when the American OSS assigned her to London late in the war.
Postwar Britain (1946–59) Dance and Oakley married in January 1947, and resided in England until moving to Connecticut in 1959. They made a lengthy trip to the US and Canada in the fall of 1946, both to re-connect with American bands as well as to meet her family. He began writing a monthly column about the jazz milleu for Jazz Journal, beginning in its first issue in 1948 until his death in 1999; while he often wrote for other publications, he only discussed his personal opinions in that column. He continued to run the family business (his main source of income), as well.
During the 1950s, he coined the term mainstream to describe those in between revivalist Dixieland and modern bebop, concentrating on black musicians. In 1958, Decca's Felsted Records commissioned Dance to produce a series of New York recordings of Coleman Hawkins, Cozy Cole/Earl Hines, Billy Strayhorn/Johnny Hodges, Buddy Tate, and several others, which were released under the collective title "Mainstream Jazz".
Oakley, however, was unhappy tied to their home. Raising four children in a 400-year-old house in a Home Counties town, unaccustomed to the English climate, she sorely missed her friends and her active working life. In their late forties, the Dances sold their English businesses and moved overseas to a house owned by her father in the Rowayton village – the 6th District of Norwalk, Connecticut – 40 miles from Manhattan. There they would try to make a living around their interests in jazz.