Evocations of The Dance - Part I

Evocations of the Dance – Part II is here.

The dream sequences of that Bowlly-fest The Singing Detective (starring Michael Gambon, below) alone are enough to remind me that I - and by extension, my generation - will never truly know the pleasures of the dance.

This being a thought that often runs through my mind as I listen to my old 78s, I found a passage in V. S. Pritchett's (below) beautiful story When My Girl Comes Home particularly pertinent, so I reproduce it here.

Here he is reminding us that the dancehall was a mysterious, sensual underworld:

The kind of writing you might expect from Whitney Balliett; but from an English writer...

Which leads me to two waltzes and a foxtrot:


Till the Clock Strikes Three - Eddie Walter's Dance Band


My Lady Divine - Alfredo & his Orchestra 
 
That ecstatic atmosphere is also captured in Larkin's unfinished poem The Dance, which begins cheerily enough (although we should remember that in Larkin's poetry this is usually misleading):

'Drink, sex and jazz - all sweet things, brother: far
Too sweet to be diluted to "a dance" '

And the word 'jazz' brings to mind the most perfect, the most enduring of all the jazz standards, Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's 'Stormy Weather', here sung with a naive charm that typifies the English dance band:


Stormy Weather - The Plaza Orchestra

Related:
Some Philip Larkin mp3s

Evocations of the Dance – Part II.