Story: Jazz and dance bands

For young people, jazz was giving way to rock 'n' roll by the late 1950s. This 1958 newsreel shows members of the Hutt Valley Youth Club dancing to rock 'n' roll in the Taita Community Hall on a Sunday afternoon. By then, more formal dances such as the foxtrot and rumba were seen as staid by teenagers.  Rock 'n' roll gave them greater opportunities to demonstrate newly acquired dance skills, and to meet friends and potential partners. Increasingly from this period, jazz was seen as music for an older generation.