Stanley Frank Dance (15 September 1910 in Braintree, Essex – 23 February 1999 in Vista, California) was a British jazz writer, business manager, record producer, and historian of the Swing era.
As a youth, he claimed he was "fortunate" to have been sent to boarding-school at Framlingham College,[2] where he first encountered American recordings of bands fronted by Jelly Roll Morton and Benny Moten, among others.
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).
[1] 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.
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)[3] 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.
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.
Dance arrived in the US with a commission from EMI's English Columbia label to make proprietary jazz recordings (they had been leasing American titles).
His books and unpublished archives offer a latter-day historian documentary insight into the world of these black jazz musicians while maintaining some of the perspective of an outsider.