Street Jazz

In as early as the 1970s, a new style of movement called "popping and locking" was already emerging. This involved sharp and hard protruding and locking movements of the body parts - shoulders, head, hips, and arms. The primary exponent of this style of street dance was a group called The Lockers (Los Angeles). They danced on TV shows - dressed in clownish, exaggerated outfits and hats. The Lockers, although short-lived in success, were the first highly visible exponents of a style of street dance that would evolve into the breakdancing of the late 1970s and hip hop and the street funk dancing of the late 1980s.

Breakdancing was a free, open body movement characterized by electric boogie (a smooth, continuous wave of movement throughout the body), poppin' (sharp hard accents of the body parts, almost like a spasm), and breakin' (gymnastic like movements and spins on the floor, sometimes spinning on the hands, arms, back, and head). It originated in urban ghettos, particularly in the South Bronx in New York in the 1970s.

In the 1990s breakdancing became hip hop, a culture of youth and street toughness. It had its own music (rap), clothing (extremely baggy pants and backwards turned baseball caps), and vocabulary. The dance moves of hip hop are derived from the same base as jazz dance - an African style of movement, but hip hop does not utilize a swing beat. Hip hop is not jazz dance in strict definition, but rather more of a close cousin to jazz dance. It shares some of the characteristics like torso movement, shuffling movements, and improvisation. The music that spawned the hip hop movement vocabulary is not from the jazz tradition, but from a time that predates jazz. If anything, hip hop is a return to a simpler, less musically complex, more rudimentary form of dance movement than jazz dance. Since movements of street jazz dance are not designed to be shown on stage, they tend to focus more on expressing the music and song lyrics instead of the traditional dance techniques and dance aesthetics.