Last weekend, a large contingent of Chicago dancers ventured up north to Minneapolis to attend the 2025 Uptown Swingout. I arrived a bit early to visit a Peace Corps friend who was in Kazakhstan with me a decade or so ago. We went to the mammoth state fair, where we saw the giant blocks of butter before they were carved into the farmers’ daughters. I ate what I thought was the first corn dog of my life, but which turned out to be a pancake batter variation called a Pronto Pop. My friend delighted in loudly booing the Waltz Lies booths. We saw majestic horses. We walked along streets dotted with mashed cookies which fell off the overflow of Sweet Martha’s buckets.

I came into the first day of Uptown Swingout with musicality front of mind. In recent Chicago social dances, I had been testing out a counting hypothesis. While dancing, I counted out, in my head, the beat of the measures. Instead of using 1 for the 1st count of the measure, I used the count of the measure within the phrase. In a standard AABA structure, I would count the 1st beat up to 4, then start over on the next phrase.

I know this sounds terrible. It doesn’t sound fun. It doesn’t sound like dancing. I have had instructors explicitly condemn counting. I don’t disagree with them. I do, however, have a suspicion that experienced dancers don’t count because they have trained themselves with extensive practice to internalize it. They count unconsciously. A jazz musician doesn’t count in their head, but without doubt they know exactly where they are in a measure and within the structure of the song. There is a correlation, here, to counting in meditation. When one counts while meditating, at first it feels like a distraction. I have felt counting was directly opposed to the goal of getting out of one’s head. It is a form of internal monologue. But it is a tool which, once done, can help concentrate one’s mind on a simple task. The swing mind-state is not the meditation mindset, but I think there may be something to the idea that counting can be a tool to direct a dancer’s attention to the music.

Conferences can be a fast-track to exploring and testing ideas. My first class of Uptown was with Nils Andrén and Bianca Locatelli. Right off the bat, they directed us to turn off our brains. They encouraged us to stop thinking about getting the steps exactly right. Unintentionally, they immediately challenged my incoming ideas. They checked the language of hypothesis testing and counting tools. They put on full display their fast footed, iconically energetic style. Their pace leaves little if any room for counting. Still, they are without doubt listening to the music, and fully aware of where they are within a measure and a phrase.

I had a mini-epiphany in the first day. It is pretty basic, but I never really put it together until last Sunday. Swing classes are built around a phrase. Conceptual classes are exceptions, and less frequently taught. Most classes feature a combination. The length of the combination usually fits a phrase or two. Sky Humphries and Frida Segerdahl led two class sessions over the weekend, each of which fit a single 4 measure phrase. At the end of the class, they performed it to “Melody in Swing” by Don Byas. The first class’s combination fit into the first A, the second into the 2nd A. After the weekend finished, I found a more enjoyable way to practice what I had learned. I mentally conjured up the song, then moved through the combination with the phrase in mind. In doing so, what I learned was reinforced, hopefully unconsciously, to common musical patterns.

This brings me to the end of my weekend’s theoretical journey. I started with counting, but ended with scatting. Alice Mei and Remi Kouakou Kouame led my track’s penultimate class of the weekend. They played soul-music throughout, in anticipation of the event’s wrap up soul-dance. Remi made an offhand comment about scat. He emphasized how important scat was to a jazz dancer’s connection to the music. Kerry Kapaku has said something to that effect in the past. While the comment wasn’t the main focus of Remi and Alice’s class, it suggested to me an alternative to counting. If a dancer scats in a way which vocalizes the phrase, sounding out the structural arch of the song — then counting is unnecessary.