How to play jazz as dance music?
I have benen playing swedish dance music (mostly on the piano accordion).
The structure of the melodies seem very important for a certain feeling.
I sometimes get the impression that dances are more than jjust the rhythms.
What do you think?
In Swedish traditional music we often say that a tune belongs to a certain dance. We seldon take a melody and change it to another dance. This seem to be true for Irish traditional music as well.
What do you say?
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There are a lot of sequence dances which tend to use the same songs, although there's no great need : as long as a particular dance sequence is, say, 16 bars long, it would do, but I guess the dancers become familiar with where they are in the sequence/song, and it's reassuring.
Then there are dances which are absolutely specific - Ballin' the Jack, the Oke Cokey, Gay Gordons, as examples.
Traditional dance music (for that, I think, is what we are talking about here) is a functional music. The melodies are shaped around the underlying structure of the rhythm, and it is fundamentally the rhythm that is the most important factor that makes a particular tune a good one for a particular dance.
To address the particular traditions you mention:
You most certainly would not take a Swedish polska, with its 3/4 rhythm emphasising the 2 and 3 beats, and expect to be able to play the same tune for a schottisch, because the schottisch is a 4/4 dance with a completely different pattern of steps and emphases.
Irish music as played on concert stages, on recordings and in sessions has often lost touch with its dance origins, but as played for set dancing is similarly tied to the intrinsic rhythms of the dance, and you would similarly not expect people to be able to dance a Clare polka to a Galway jig.
Such distinctions hold true across all forms of traditional dance (English Morris dance tunes may ostensibly have the same fundamental melody but the subtleties of rhythm are different for different village's versions of the dances, and confusion swiftly ensues if one were to play the wrong version of the tune for the particular dance being performed); and of course this is also true beyond traditional dance, into ballroom dancing, ballet, street dance etc.
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