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"I've told the other jazz musicians that they should play for the dancers, but they don't listen," said saxophonist Houston Person as we left the stage and entered our green room. We had just finished playing the final night of the Frankie Manning 95th Birthday Festival at the Manhattan Center for approximately 2,000 ecstatic dancers from all over the world, who hung onto our every break and stop, throwing their partners high into the air with each drum roll.

Houston had always made it clear, over our many grits breakfasts together, that in his opinion it wasn't rock & roll that killed jazz... it was when jazz musicians stopped entertaining. Tonight, the full implications of his statement became clear. The Savoy Ballroom was the Studio 54 of its time. Jazz was not music to be analyzed, it was to be felt. Music bubbled up in the feet of the youth into an explosion of Lindy Hop.

Back in 1990, while I was singing at the Club Deluxe on Haight Street, I first noticed the dancers beginning to grow more and more every week around the small dias stage at the club. This first crop of the retro Renaissance revival — tattooed, pierced and Betty Page-banged dancers dressed in vintage clothes and heels — soon gave way to another generation of khaki pants and white sneakers who drank less but danced more. During this time there was a palpable excitement in the scene as swing bands one by one were courted by major label A&R guys.

One of the major factors that makes music popular is the ability of youth to dance to it. Rap, hip-hop, R&B, disco, salsa and rock & roll all have danceable rhythms. Even hard rock inspires the head-banging, hair-swinging, "Doll House Strip Club" moves that influence women to sign up for pole dancing classes. Even Britney Spears — removed from her teenage throne, abundant with negative press — still sells tons of albums. Why? Because the stuttering "Womanizer" is almost impossible to not move to when blared at full volume in a dance club.

Jazz started out as danceable music. With the increasing disfranchisement and post-WWII disillusion, however, came a reluctance among black musicians to entertain. Soon, white musicians began affecting the anti-Tom attitudes of many of the black players. While some musicians still played jazz that was danceable and entertaining, the predominant trend leaned toward intellectualism, Coltrane-esque spiritualism, boundary-pushing, re-harmonization and complex rhythms. And so it stands today that so many singers and instrumentalist are worried about their jazz pedigree that they overplay, yet don't know how to swing.

This is particularly a problem with singers, because critics are quick to dismiss white singers as pop or cabaret and black singers as blues, and if you have a Latin last name and you don't sing any Latin tunes, then you are really in trouble. Billie Holiday, for example, is one of the greatest Jazz singers of all time, yet the press habitually called her a blues singer, despite the fact that she only sang about three blues tunes and left the Count Basie Band because she didn't like singing blues.

Today, we have thousands of young dancers that are crazy about Lindy and crazy for the gentleman who popularized it, the dynamic and inimitable Frankie Manning. They want to shim sham to "Stomping at the Savoy" and "T'aint What You Do." They get wild and high-stepping for burners like "Lester Leaps In." They improvise their steps with the music and we in turn improvise with them, and together we banish that feeling that jazz is museum piece to viewed with reverence but never played with. We eradicate my grandmother's arthritis and she jokes and laughs and dances with men half her age, oblivious to the fact the pain near her newly-installed pacemaker has miraculous disappeared and she is 25 one again.

Jazz and dance go hand in hand like Webb and the Savoy, like Basie and Jump, like Ellington and Swing. We often end up the victims of our own backlash. Keeping jazz hot and danceable does not diminish its integrity. It heightens it.

I leave you with a video of 80-year-old Dawn Hampton, singer and sister of the trombonist Slide Hampton, dancing at Manning's funeral with jazz singer John Dokes.