Category Archives: lindy hop and other dances

I am full of hayfever and premenstrual rage. I am, of course, excellent company. The Squeeze is in the garage with his earplugs in, podcasts a-blasting as he rebuilds his bike.

Thinking more about music I might play for the Gangbusters set.
Brief: > 180bpm, high energy music that gets people dancing like crazy fools.

Classic big band swing rock stars
These guys are the top ten, Christina Aguileras of the swing era. It sounds a bit same, but that’s because you’re listening to the popular music of one very specific period, music whose primary purpose was dancing. The large bands are firmly managed by serious, competent (and often quite gifted) arrangements. The musicians are highly skilled, and the bands themselves were playing to live audiences, on the radio and in recordings every week, travelling all the time. These are professional musicians with serious skills. Solos are usually pre-planned, if not scored ahead of time.

Musicians are grouped by section (eg ‘brass’, ‘rhythm’, etc) and you often get a number of people playing the same instrument – a couple of trumpeters, a couple of clarinetists. This grouping and concentration of instrumentation allows the bands to bring a solid wall of sound. I like this stuff as a dancer because there are layers of sound – different parts, multiple parts to the melody happening at any one time. Beyond notes, there are layers of rhythms which can be very simple (the chunk chunk chunk of a walking bass line) or very complex (the brass, rhythm section and woodwinds all playing contrasting and complementary rhythms as well as notes). Solos are often contrasted against a ‘background’ of supporting instruments. There’s lots to hear, and lots to work with in my body.

Smaller groups of the same period
These are smaller groups, usually made up of smaller sections of a big band, of a group of like-minded musicians or of groups put together for promotional or creative purposes. The arrangements are sweet, but there’re usually more opportunities for improvisation. Each instrument is showcased in a way large bands don’t allow. There aren’t the same walls of sound or complex layers of melody and rhythm. Bands like Benny Goodman’s small groups often had quite sophisticated, complicated relationships between the instruments, but in his case in particular, they were also quite delicate rather than ear-shaking thumpers. I’m very fond of Ellington’s small groups for the way they show cased particular instrumentalists and matched chunky rhythms with interesting melodies and musicianship. I like the Chicago boys of the late 20s for their raucous exuberance. People like Joe Venuti and Django Reinhardt add a more string-driven sound that feels a little less chunky and a little more visually interesting. I’m also fond of bands like the blokes from Glenn Miller’s band working in France after his death, or Roy Eldridge’s smaller groups.
There are lots of smaller bands from this same 30s-40s period, and I tend to think of them as complements to larger projects (like Ellington’s smaller groups or Basie’s work with Benny Goodman’s small bands). There are also New Orleans revivalist projects, or, to put it another way, smaller or medium sized bands featuring New Orleans stars, but doing a more swinging version of New Orleans style hot jazz. Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory – all these guys were involved in projects like these. Sidney Bechet’s groups in this vein are massively popular with lindy hoppers, though they’re not quite the super-hot stuff they were five years ago. And then there are vocal groups and groups with a humorous or novelty twist. Slim and Slam. Cats and the Fiddle. Stuff Smith’s groups. Fats Waller. Teddy Wilson. And so on.

Working with all this stuff, I’ve certainly got plenty to get me through the set. But there are lots of less well-known musicians and groups to add. Western swing doods like Bob Wills. British acts like Danny Polo. The Harlem Hamfats (who have gotten quite popular lately, but who I’m not entirely sure are top shelf acts). European bands like the Harlem Kiddies and Leo Mathisen’s various bands. Smaller combos or bands led or fronted by vocalists like Una Mae Carlisle or Maxine Sullivan. Willie the Lion Smith’s bits and pieces.

…and so on and so on…

There’s so much to work with even before I get to contemporary bands. And I tend to feel there just aren’t modern bands who were as good as some of these bands when they were at the best. There are the odd contemporary bands who are really, really good. But the social and lifestyle factors which produced the musicians of the swing era just don’t exist today.
I know this makes me a bit of a boring old stick, but I guess I am quite conservative. But that doesn’t mean I will ignore or not play contemporary bands that are good. My sets are loaded with new bands. Loaded.

Who are my go-to guys for this set, then?

• Count Basie, 1930s-40s. Kind of a blunt object, but his rhythm section really pounds along. 1937-1949, for the most part. I don’t have anything between 1932 and 1936, which seems odd to me – I’ll check it out. But I like this late 30s/40s big band sound. Lots of musicians, thoroughly organised, pounding out solid, four-on-the-floor, commonest of common time swinging hits. Good fun for dancing, solid rhythms, catchy melodies. This Basie period is pretty much the archetypal swing era, and many of his band’s biggest hits are iconic songs in the contemporary swing world.
• Chick Webb, Ella Fitzgerald and the 1930s Webb’s band did some really amazing stuff without Ella, and then Ella did some really good stuff with the band after Webb died. I’m not talking about the cheesy novelty lyric stuff she sang, but the bits where she led the band in some really freaking amazing live recordings. This stuff is exactly what I’m talking about when I say ‘classic swinging big band for lindy hop’. There’s a reason they were the Savoy house band. And this stuff is built for excellent, up tempo lindy hop.
• Fletcher Henderson, early 1930s. Henderson’s early 30s band was super hot and super good. Lots of fast, hardcore songs which are just perfect for lindy hop. I think the band tailed off a little in the later 30s, but his arranging work with Benny Goodman during this moment demonstrates his badassery.
• Jimmie Lunceford, 1930s. This was one of those bands that is, in my mind, associated with the American (and mainstream Melbourne) lindy hop world shifting from groover to more old school music. I don’t have quite as much Lunceford as I’d like, but my preference is for the 30s stuff. Big, solid swinging orchestras kicking it extremely hardcore.
• Lionel Hampton Someone I used to play a lot, but really someone I’ll put in this basket, mostly because I tend to lump him in with the 40s guys. Which is a bit silly. There are great songs like ‘Gin For Christmas’, ‘Flying Home’, ‘Munson Street Breakdown’ and so on. But he’s not really my go-to guy for this sort of set.
• Duke Ellington, 1930s I have a lot of love for Ellington’s big band. At times he can be a bit too finicky or precise for dancing like a crazy fool. I find the discordant, experimental elements of his 40s and later stuff irritates me when I’m lindy hopping. But he wrote some amazing pieces of music, and I adore his 30s band. I actually prefer his late 20s big band stuff above all others, but it’s not quite swinging enough for what I’d think of as second wave lindy hop. There are a few songs I’d like to stuff into this set, though – ‘Stevedore Stomp’ (1929), ‘Hittin’ the Bottle’ (1930), ‘Jungle nights in Harlem’ (1930) and so on.
• Other people: Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Willie Bryant, Andy Kirk. I love these guys, but I don’t have a whole heap of them. Andy Kirk because his band didn’t do that much before they got too sweet and mainstream. Willie Bryant because… I just don’t. Artie Shaw I have quite a bit of, but most of it is not exactly where I’d like to go. Not counting, of course, songs like ‘Traffic Jam’, some of the Grammercy Five stuff and so on. I have masses and masses of Goodman small group stuff, but not quite enough of his big band to really work him properly. I have the hits, but I don’t really have a thorough understanding of his big band. Which is a shame, as songs like ‘Bugle Call Rag’, ‘Roll em’ and so on are great. I have quite a bit of his live stuff, but the quality is just too crap. Charlie Barnet, the Dorseys, etc. All good. Will play.
• Mills Blue Rhythm Band and related acts. ‘Big John’s Special’, ‘Algier’s Stomp’ and so on. All win. I tend to lump the McKinney’s Cotton Pickers in with the MBRB. No real reason, other than I got into them at about the same time. Henry Red Allen. Joining many of these bands together. Luis Russell’s bands, for linking up Allen, Louis Armstrong and other folk. At this point I tend to follow artists and pick them up in various bands.

I’m currently preparing for a set at the upcoming Melbourne Lindy Exchange, and figured I might annotate the process.

[Rereading, this has turned out to be a really boring post. I’ll post with interesting band names and song ideas later. Hopefully that’ll be more interesting.]

MLX is currently the largest event in Australian lindy hop, except perhaps for Camp Oz in Adelaide, which is a week of workshops. MLX is an all-social event. By ‘big’ I mean that it attracts more registrations from dancers than other events. Its program is also ‘big’, but there are bigger. Before 2005 it was a workshop weekend with some social bits. It was the first Australian camp or exchange. In 2005 it changed completely, coordinated by the non-profit Melbourne Jazz Dance Association. I was part of that group. We ran it as a social weekend partly because we didn’t have enough time or money to book international teachers, but mostly because we wanted to run the sort of event that we would really like to go to: good floors, good bands, good DJs, all at as low a price as possible. Everything else was secondary. That last point about money is important as the previous year MLX had cost $500 for a full pass (which did cover 8 days rather than 4). We were, basically, a bunch of hippies. Five years later, MLX is far bigger than it has ever been before, attracting dancers from all over the country and world. It is the premier social dancing event in the country.

It’s also the one event in the calendar where I feel I can really DJ to my limits. I feel as though the dancers are most willing to experiment with new songs, have the highest level of fitness and a real passion for exploring new music. I have to note, though, that I haven’t been to Hullabaloo in Perth for a while, and I remember that as a similarly quality weekend, but with workshops. The all-social program means that dancers will stay up all night, to the very end.

So, anyway, whatever, where am I going with this?
The point is that in 2006 we ran two rooms on the Thursday welcome night dance. Which was a first time thing. Downstairs was straight ahead lindy hop, upstairs was Gangbusters. This is what we wrote about it on the website:

Gangbusters
The Cats and Fiddle vocal group recorded Gangbusters in 1939, a song whose chorus – “bang bang bang!” – echoes the feel of this high-energy Hot Side. The MLX6 Gangbusters features superfast tracks for speedfreaks, balboan and lindy hopper alike.
The MLX6 Gangbusters features DJ Trev Hutchison (Perth).

It was immensely successful, which is in no small part due to the word of mouth promotion and general building of excitement carried out by dancers before the weekend. There was much mutual challenging and commitment to dance every song. Trev did a really, really good job.

This was in a year when Melbourne had only recently made a sort of transition from extremely slow music to something a little quicker. There was still quite a bit of resistance to older music from the 20s, 30s and 40s from most dancers. So we were taking a punt. But it came off. We could have run it again the next year, but I can’t remember.

So now, four years later, I’m not involved in running MLX and haven’t been since we moved to Sydney in 2008. And I’m DJing a set in the Gangbusters bracket!

This year MLX is also hosting the Hellzapoppin’ contest, which is really just a very fast lindy hop contest where dancers battle in a phrase by phrase format. I think it’s the most interesting competition in the country. The phrase battle format makes it interesting, the tempos make it exciting and the lack of fluffy rules makes it feel a bit real. There’s also a strong audience enthusiasm component – the audience’s response contributes to the competitors’ score.
What this means is that the competition will have people’s interest in fast music up. Hopefully it’ll also mean that there’ll be dancers there with better fitness and better dance skills who can hack those tempos. But I am actually following the comp night (admittedly with a two hour gap) at the late night, DJing first at the late night. I’m quite ok with a first set – I like setting up the room and I prefer to DJ first if I’m planning a big night of dancing. And I am.

Here’s how I’m approaching the set:

• Warm the room from nothing to a set where the tempos don’t go below 180bpm. This is tricky if the room is empty. I’m probably going to start lower (no lower than 140, probably at about 160) and when I reach critical mass, I’m going to chunk it up. But it’s going to be something I do very carefully. In fact, it’s a bad idea to plan how I’ll handle this part of the night – you really have to pay attention to the people in the room, figure out how they’re feeling, and then respond to that. In this setting, as the first DJ, I tend to avoid coming in with a wall of massive energy sound because it just feels too aggressive. But if I start too chilled, I’ll never get up where I need to be. So I’m thinking higher tempos with a mellower sound or energy. Light, fun, but not too massive.
• Set up the room for the next DJ. This means that I need to get the room ‘warm’ before the next DJ starts. She’s expecting hot, fast tempos, so she’ll be a bit shitty if I’m grooving along at 120bpm when she arrives. It also means that I can’t totally kill the dancers before she gets there – I have to work the energy so they have little emotional and physical breaks. And yet still keep the energy, enthusiasm and excitement up. I predict the Gangbusters will peak about midway through the second DJ’s set, if she keeps the energy building. I think it’ll stay hot for an hour, and then mellow a bit by the middle of the last DJ’s set. Over all, that’s about four or five hours of very fast music. If you assume most people jog at about 150bpm, then a tempo range of 180-350 is kind of serious. Other things will affect the session though – the aircon (or lack of), availability of water, what’s happening in the other room at the same time, the social make up of the room and so on. When I’m warming a room, I often like to check with the following DJ where they’d like to start, so I can kind of move things that way.
• Keep it old school – in style at least. I’m going to aim for recordings from the 1920s-1950s, but I have a few modern bands I like who do some seriously hot stuff. So I’ll just see how things go. The newer stuff might be a good starting point.
• Favour the big bands and classic swing. There’s a lot of smaller New Orleans band action getting about at the moment, and while I do like that stuff, I think that the big, solidly swinging powerhouses of the 30s and 40s are where it’s at for massive energy lindy hop. I’m going to try to play like the Savoy in the 30s. I’m into bigger bands from the 30s for my own dancing at the moment because they’re BIG and that means they have to have some serious arrangements – the band has to be organised. And organised well. And that means they’ll actually be putting down some pretty bad arse songs. I also l like the depth of sound and rhythm and melody in a big band – there’s lots there for me to work with. I’m into a few smaller bands as well, but I’m going to avoid vocal groups like Slim and Slam and the Cats and the Fiddle, because I want to build sound and energy, and those guys often drop the energy. However, there are a few of these types of songs which are very chic with dancers at the moment, so I’m going to use those judiciously. Which leads me to…
• I’m going to work the wave. Which means that I’m going to work up and down the tempos, from 180-350. It also means I’m going to work up and down the emotional scale – from massive, full on excitement to more relaxed, lighter feelings. Just because the room is ‘fast’ doesn’t mean it has to be dull. I find that sitting on one tempo is boring, no matter what the speed. And using just one mood or energy level can be equally dull. In a room like this I will need to be sure I keep the energy up, though, so I won’t sit on the mellow stuff much. I’ll use it to offer dancers an emotional break. I think of this as starting at a base, calm level, then working dancers up to a climax, then backing off (but not back to where we started), then building them up, then backing off, then building up. The trick is figuring out where the final climax is, and just how much people have left in them after that. There’s nothing as horrible as a DJ who just keeps pounding away.*

Well, that’s my list of ‘rules’. The first rule of DJing, of course, is there are no rules. And as soon as you play to an agenda or try to work a plan, you fail to work the room, you fail to connect with the dancers, and you fuck up. Badly.
So my real preparation for this set involves my listening to all my fast music (which is quite a big task), weeding out anything that’s not totally top shelf. I’m looking at a range of tempos and styles and energy levels, so I have a little of everything on hand. And I’ll be able to respond to whatever I see.

*Which reminds me. At both exchanges lately I’ve seen DJs with their heads down in their laptops, headphones on, the volume up really high in the room, playing some loud song, and the floor empty because people have literally gone home. Meanwhile the poor volunteers who have to clean up and close up after the gig are exhausted and/or asleep in a huddle. This is not a cool thing. My rule for the last set of the night: there has to be 2 or more couples on the floor at all times. If I get 2 songs in a row with less, I end the set.