‘Historical Recreation’: Fat Suits, Blackface and Dance

I’m just doing some housekeeping over here in the blog (hence the somewhat dodgy CSS), and have been looking back through unpublished drafts. This is a post that I wrote back in July. I put off publishing it then because I was getting a bit more attention than I felt comfortable with. So I just put it on pause. It’s probably going to be read as controversial, but to my mind it’s really just standard critical engagement with a few texts. But the fact that I’m writing about people in my own community in a way that academics often don’t – ie with a real sense that my words have consequences and aren’t just ‘neutral’ observation – changes the way this will be read. And the way I think about writing this stuff.

So, I guess this is my unpacking and rummaging through a little cultural baggage. I’ve made plenty of apologetic explanations below, though it kind of shits me that I feel so little confidence in my own ideas. But, you know, this is a post about talking about important issues. Right now, in this moment when my government is taking such a shameful stance on refugees (fuck off, you’re not white, we don’t want you here), is continuing with the NT Intervention (fuck off, you’re not white, we don’t want you here) and generally being complete arseholes, I think it’s more important to take a few risks myself.

Structurally, this post begins with Lisa Wade’s article which discusses Sarah and Dax’s ESDC 2011 routine. I tie in (in a limited way), the Two Cousins video clip which starred Ryan Francois and Remy Kouakou Kouame.
Then I explain why I’m not entirely ok with Lisa’s use of ‘black’ and ‘white’ – I want a more critically nuanced approach, one which also looks at how class and gender work in ethnicity. I’m especially frustrated by her use of the concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ because it doesn’t prioritise or encourage activism (or speaking out about or engaging with racism). I suggest a more politicised approach helps. Then I suggest that all this makes more sense within cultural context: race and ethnicity in Australia, Britain and America; the way different film texts work within an historical industrial context; reading Sarah and Dax’s performance in relation to their broader online presence (ie their blog). That last bit is important because I tie their talk about bodies, beauty and gender into this performance’s portrayal of bodies, ‘fat’ and masculinity.

I started writing this comment over at Lisa Wade’s post ‘RACE, APPROPRIATION, & LINDY HOP: HOW TO HONOR OUR HEROES’, but I couldn’t really justify such a long comment on someone else’s post. I want to write and write about this, because I’ve spent so much time looking at cultural transmission in lindy hop, and the role digital media plays in this process. I’ve spent a long time thinking about this stuff, and I think I have some responses to Lisa’s question

How do white people, especially when they’re more or less on their racial own, honor art forms invented by oppressed racial groups without “stealing” them from those that invented them, misrepresenting them, or honoring them in ways that reproduce racism? You tell me… ’cause I’d like to know.

But it’s such a complex issue, and I’m not really sure I have the brains to work through it right now. I certainly want to return to my brief and fairly rubbish post about Slow Club’s Two Cousins clip, but I don’t really have room to think about that right now, either.

So why am I posting at all? I want to jot these ideas down. I want to participate (that is my greatest fault, I think – I hate the thought of missing out!) Also, I LOVE to talk and write. And this is my blog, so I can just ramble on as long as I like.

This is Lisa’s original post. I’m reproducing it here because posts disappear. Please note: I’m using Lisa’s first name rather than her last because that’s how we tend to address peeps in the dance world. I certainly don’t mean any disrespect.

RACE, APPROPRIATION, & LINDY HOP: HOW TO HONOR OUR HEROES
by Lisa Wade, 1 day ago [6 Jully 2011] at 10:00 am

Lindy hopper Jerry Almonte sent along a clip of the first place-winning routine in a division at the European Swing Dance Championships. Lindy hop is a partner dance invented by African American youth in Harlem dancing to swing music in the early 1930s. It’s near and dear to my heart; I’ve been a lindy hopper for 13 years (minus that year with a broken leg).

Modern day lindy hop raises difficult questions. In a post I wrote when the beloved Frankie Manning died, titled Race, Entertainment, and Historical Borrowing, I tried to capture the conundrum. I’m going to quote myself extensively, only because this is a tricky issue that deserves real discussion:

Though lindy hop was invented by African Americans, lindy hoppers today are primarily white. These contemporary dancers look to old movie clips of famous black dancers as inspiration. And this is where things get interesting: The old clips feature profoundly talented black dancers, but the context in which they are dancing is important. Professional black musicians, choreographers, and dancers had to make the same concessions that other black entertainers at the time made. That is, they were required to capitulate to white producers and directors who presented black people to white audiences. These movies portrayed black people in ways that white people were comfortable with: blacks were musical, entertaining, athletic (even animalistic), outrageous (even wild), not-so-smart, happy-go-lucky, etc.

So what we see in the old clips that contemporary lindy hoppers idolize is not a pure manifestation of lindy hop, but a manifestation of the dance infused by racism. While lindy hoppers today look at those old clips with nothing short of reverance, they are mostly naive to the fact that the dancing they are emulating was a product made to confirm white people’s beliefs about black people.

So we have a set of (mostly) white dancers who (mostly) naively and (always) wholeheartedly emulate a set of black dancers whose performances, now 70 to 80 years old, were produced for mostly white audiences and adjusted according to the racial ethos of the time. On the one hand, it’s neat that the dance is still alive; it’s wonderful to see it embodied, and with so much enthusiasm, so many years later. And certainly no ill will can be fairly attributed to today’s dancers. On the other hand, it’s troubling that the dance was appropriated then (for white audiences) and that it is that appropriation that lives on (for mostly white dancers). Then again, without those dancers, there would likely be no revival at all. And without those clips, however imperfect, the dance might have remained in obscurity, lost with the bodies of the original dancers.

It is this paradox that stirred Jerry to send along the clip of Dax Hock and Sarah Breck performing a routine that was an homage to a famous clip from the movie Day at the Races, featuring Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. Here’s the original clip from 1937.

And here’s Dax and Sarah’s routine (Dax, btw, is in a fat suit; an entirely different and equally troublesome issue).

To be as clear as possible, I do believe 100% that Dax and Sarah have no intention to mock and, as essentially professional lindy hoppers, I doubt very much that they’ve never considered the ideas I’ve explained above.

Dax and Sarah are not my target here and, besides, they’re just two people. All conscious lindy hoppers struggle with these issues. My target, and my own personal struggle, is the entire endeavor.

I leave this as an open question for discussion, and one that extends far beyond lindy hop to jazz, blues, rap, and hip hop music; other forms of dance, like break dancing and pop and locking; and even the American obsession with spectating sports that are currently dominated by black athletes. It also extends far past the relationship between blacks and whites, as Adrienne Keene well illustrates in her blog, Native Appropriations.

How do white people, especially when they’re more or less on their racial own, honor art forms invented by oppressed racial groups without “stealing” them from those that invented them, misrepresenting them, or honoring them in ways that reproduce racism? You tell me… ’cause I’d like to know.
———————
For more, I’d be thrilled if you read my original post, inspired by the passing of Frankie Manning.

Also worth considering is this beautiful music video (Slow Club, Two Cousins) featuring lindy hoppers Ryan Francoise and Remy Kouakou Kouame performing vintage jazz movement. Is it different? What makes it so (other than production value and the race of the dancers)? Can you articulate it? Or is it tacit knowledge?

Inspired in part by The Spirit Moves?

I’m interested in Lisa’s points, but I think some of the key issues need a little expansion. I find some of her conclusions troubling. So I’m going to address them here in a disorganised, ad hoc way. Cool. Not.

Initially, I’m not comfortable with talking about race or ethnicity without also talking about class (and then gender and then sexuality). This becomes particularly important when you consider lindy hop in Japan or Korea or Singapore. The majority of dancers there are not white, but perhaps they are middle class? I think that it’s very, very important to interrogate class as an engagement with social and cultural power; it is not enough to end with skin colour as the defining marker of race or ethnicity.
In a related point, I also have some troubles with the way Lisa talks about ‘white people’ as though they were a homogenous group. I mean, setting aside class, sexuality and a heap of other issues, it’s been fairly stunning to me to see how simply having a group of women perform the Tranky Doo changes its meaning. So I think we need to be careful of using ‘white’ and ‘black’ as blanket terms, lumping masses of people together under single terms. ‘Black’ is especially interesting, as the word works in different ways in Australia, in America, in the UK, in Europe. And then within those countries the word is used in different ways by different groups and individuals.

And I have some concerns about approaching this discussion via the concept of ‘tacit knowledge’. Simply, I think there are other, more useful ways of talking about what’s going on in the clips. I’m with Katrina Hazzard Gordon and Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy and bell hooks and Judith Butler… I think we need to engage with the ideology at work here in an actively politicised way. Because these performances aren’t ideologically neutral, nor are the effects of their actions neutral. We need to engage with these issues, we need to unpack the politics, interpersonal as well as institutional. To do otherwise would be to ignore the way these texts embody the wider discourses of the societies in which lindy hop scenes exist, how they function culturally and socially in the modern lindy hop world, and how they articulate power within lindy hop today.

As an example, Lisa suggests that we cannot articulate why a performance might be racist, but we have ‘tacit knowledge’ of what racism is. I find this approach a little lame. Racism does not exist in a black/white, on/off dichotomy. It works in complex ways and a particular text might be articulating racist ideas in a range of ways, might be read as racist because of how it frames or reproduces and supports racism through the relationship between textual elements, reception and then dissemination. I would suggest that not being able to articulate why something ‘feels’ racist should just be the starting point. Don’t stop here! Speaking up about racism is very important – do it!
If I find a particular routine or image discomforting, I don’t say ‘oh, it’s racist because I have a tacit knowledge of racism’. I start analysing the text, the way the text is framed, where I found it, what other texts were circulating at the same time. I start interrogating my own feelings and try to figure out what’s happening. The goal here is that we learn how to articulate our concerns, and then develop the confidence to articulate them. Tacit my arse. Let’s get fucking ACTIVE here!

After all, if we simply say ‘I think it’s racist but I can’t explain why’, how is this any more convincing an argument than ‘I don’t think it’s racist, and I don’t have to explain why’? You need to start expressing your ideas, and exploring your concerns so that you can then say to those ‘I don’t think it’s racist’ people: “I’m suspicious of the fact that we see so many scenes where black dancers are dressed as servants in films. So I reckon we should think twice before we recreate those scenes.”

Cultural context is important. It’s difficult to apply American critical tools for discussing race and cultural transmission to the UK or Europe (where Ryan Francoise and Remy Kouakou Kouame are based), for example. The black British migrant experience is also quite different to the American, and histories of slavery in Britain, America and Australia are quite different. I faced similar challenges discussing lindy hop in Australia, where our discursive engagement with race is quite different to the American example.

It’s very difficult to talk about black American dance in film in the 30s without also talking about slavery, blackface and minstrelsy and segregation in American history. It’s difficult enough addressing these issues in an American setting, but it’s even harder in an Australian context. Many Australians simply aren’t aware of this country’s slave history. A recent debate about the use of blackface on a tv program revealed not only most Australians’ unfamiliarity with blackface in Australia, but with the racial politics at work in blackface in an American context. Nor do many Australians really understand the long standing history of segregation in this country. They simply don’t know that black Australians couldn’t eat, drink, shop, swim or travel in the same spaces as white Australians. So when Australians watch sequences from films like the Day At The Races, with all its intonations of segregation, black face, slavery and so on, these themes don’t resonate in the same way as when an American watches. I guess, here, we also need to talk about audiences and reception as well as cultures of production (and institutions producing and disseminating media texts).

When we’re talking about dance clips, who is watching? Where are they watching? The Slow Club text is a music video. We are talking about Dax and Sarah’s showcase routine as an AV recording of a performance at a dance competition in Europe. I am a white, middle class woman living in a large, well-serviced, safe city in Australia watching these clips on my (reasonably ok) internet connection in my own home on my own computer. I am a dancer, but I am not a brilliant dancer. I am/was a media studies scholar who’s studied and published and taught film and media studies and who wrote a PhD on race/gender/identity in dance and digital media. All these things shape the way I read these texts. What I see will reflect who I am and what I am reading for. How I use these texts will reflect these things as well. I am also reading these texts in relation to each other, and in relation to a vast body of audio-visual recordings of dance. I’m accessing them online, and I’m reading them in relation to other online texts – Sarah and Dax’s blog, Faceplant, the Yehoodi discussion board, the Yehoodi Talk show, Lisa’s blog, etc etc etc. These texts don’t exist in isolation. They are part of and constitute a discourse on/about dance.

The Slow Club clip is interesting because it’s a British band featuring European dancers. The song exists in an international context, and is referencing American television performances by black American dancers. But these performances circulate today again in an international context, and are most familiar to middle class dancers in a number of countries.
I think we need to talk about masculinity as well. Luckily Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall have done a lot of the heavy lifting for discussions about black British masculinity and identity.

While I’ve found the Slow Club clip quite exciting and interesting and posted a little bit about it already, the Dax and Sarah clip is a little more challenging. I cannot help but engage with this performance in reference to the things they’ve written about gender on their own blog. I wrote a couple of things in response to their posts myself: Women talking about their own bodies and how this issue was trolled or women dancers wearing high heels and talking about it (Saturday, March 26th, 2011) and Fuck that shit. I’m not wearing no fucking high heeled shoes (Tuesday, April 5th, 2011). I’m sure they are endorsing conventionally gendered notions of physical ‘beauty’. I’m not sure they’re actually engaging reflexively with the way their appearance (when that appearance includes gender and race and class and other identity markers) informs audiences’ readings of their dancing.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m on some sort of anti Dax and Sarah vendetta. I’m not. It’s just that they keep/kept leaping into the public discourse with such enthusiasm. As I wrote in the ‘Women talking about their own bodies…’ post, I think that lindy hoppers need to think through their public personas, and to be aware of the fact that teachers and performers – ‘celebrity lindy hoppers’ – are going to attract a great deal of public scrutiny.

As I write this I’m thinking about my own experiences with public scrutiny. The recent attention to this blog has been difficult to adjust to. I’m not sure I like all this attention. I know I haven’t liked some of the unpleasant comments I’ve had to delete, and it’s definitely been strange being approached by strangers at dance events who feel they ‘know me’ or have a right to regale me with their opinions at 2am while I’m DJing. I haven’t liked that. But then, this is the internet. If I’d wanted to keep my ideas secret, I shouldn’t have posted them…

… wait a minute. Fuck that. It smells a little too much like ‘don’t wear a short skirt or walk about by yourself at night if you want to be safe’. Don’t we all deserve respect and safety, just BECAUSE?

Yes.
Which is why I want to repeat: Sarah and Dax are great dancers, I suppose they could also be great people (I wouldn’t know). But that doesn’t mean I don’t think there are some problems with the things they’ve said online and done in dance performances. I feel that we need to engage with the ideas behind and within dancing as well. That stuff isn’t ideologically neutral: dancing IS discourse. And when you put it out there, in a competition, you are inviting discussion. So I’m going to discuss.

Firstly, I certainly don’t think Dax or Sarah intended offence, and I’m almost certain they intended their dancing as homage. That routine also has to be read in reference to other recreations of iconic routines: in this setting, and by these dancers, this routine was almost certainly intended as a mark of respect and admiration for the ‘original lindy hoppers’. It is however, I’m fairly certain, not a critically reflexive performance of racialised identity. In other words, I don’t think Dax and Sarah thought this thing through. Which, really, isn’t that surprising if you read them as young white people who haven’t had to engage with the issues of race and power embodied in the Day At The Races film. When you are a member of an empowered group, you don’t need to think about these things. Because they enable what you do, rather than inhibit you.

The troubling part seems to be the ‘fat suit’ (and what a troubling term that is), and I would have liked to see Lisa place this in the foreground of her article, rather than setting it aside. It seems to me that the suit initiates connotations of ‘humour’, and that is where many of the difficulties with this routine lie. It is difficult to negotiate when and how the ‘joke’ begins in this routine. Fat people are funny? Black fat people are funny? White fat people are funny? I find all these ideas deeply offensive, but also indicative of both the dancers’ ideas about physical beauty (which they have both articulated at length on their blog) and of modern lindy hop’s ideas about ‘beautiful bodies’. Would the routine have prompted such debate if it had presented a more familiar example of male athleticism? If Dax had appeared in his usual muscled, fit, and conventionally attractive body?

I’m wondering if the fat suit works as a sort of ‘blackface’. It’s a performance of a particular type of masculinity which, while it isn’t physically ‘black’, is continually referencing the black bodies dancing in Day At The Races. The very point of that routine is that it requires audiences’ familiarity with that film. Race is there, even if it is ‘invisible’. And I must say, here, that whiteness is as much about race and ethnicity as blackness is. To make whiteness ‘neutral’ or unmarked by race is wrongtown.

But then, how are we supposed to respond to this routine? Are we supposed to ‘laugh at the fat guy’? I know that in most lindy hop culture the muscled, athletic body is valorised (you only need consider the popularity of P90X and Insanity for evidence). If we are supposed to ‘laugh at the fat guy’, is it possible to also admire and valorise this ‘fat body’ at the same time? The crux of the original Day At The Races clip lies in exactly this tension: the dancer’s ability to perform impressive acts of athleticism with his body. Additionally, ‘fatness’ and fleshliness carried different connotative values in 1930s black American culture. So Dax and Sarah bring a different understanding of ‘fat’ to that clip, and to their performances. And audiences watching Dax and Sarah perform are watching from another point in time and culture.

I think gender is important here. The ‘fat suit’ – the ‘fat guy’ – only works in reference to the other male bodies on screen, and most particularly, the female body on-screen and on-stage. Dax in the ‘fat suit’ only works when compared to Sarah’s presentation of highly conventional female ‘beauty’. While she is also in connotative ‘blackface’ (at that same distance Dax is – through reference to the film and in her costuming), she is also in ‘whiteface’, wearing an athletic, healthy, conventionally ‘female’ body. The joke requires the conventionally attractive white/black heterosexual woman as foil for the ‘laugh at the fat guy’ joke. Part of the joke is the implication that ‘the fat guy’ has to be a seriously badarse dancer to secure such an attractive partner, because she’d otherwise have no interest in him.

I suspect that this is where the real conflict lies. One of the most persistent taboos in lindy hop today is disrespecting dancers from the 30s or 40s. It makes us uncomfortable to negotiate the disrespect of ‘laughing at the fat guy’ when this ‘fat guy’ (Dax in costume) is meant to be one of the Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. Not only is Dax appropriating a black performance (of awesome dancing) from a film produced in decidedly unjust social context, he is also capitalising on the joke. He is not going to be the butt of this joke – we know he is wearing ‘the fat suit’ – so he is ‘safe’. He’s ‘not actually fat’. He doesn’t need to physically experience what it is to be ‘fat’ in modern American culture. He takes no risks. But at the same time he can also claim credit for the dancing ability he demonstrates – it’s good dancing, he is a good dancer. This is also where their performance fails, really, to realise the goals of the original performance. The original dance scene was impressive because he was a ‘fat guy’ who danced well despite/with his body. We never forget that Dax is ‘wearing the fat suit’. He has nothing to ‘overcome’, here.

[I would to talk about a Yehoodi talk show interview (16 March 2011) where Dax talks about dancing with an injury on So You Think You Can Dance, and how this is different to ‘dancing fat’, but I don’t really have space or time or brainz to do it. Except to say that there’s something interesting to be written about dance, injuries, perceptions of injuries, pain and masculinity.]

There is the chance, though, that Dax and Sarah didn’t intend this reading. Perhaps they are working to present an alternative portrayal of white masculinity. The physically large, well-fleshed heterosexual man as desirable, desiring, powerful and admirable subject. Perhaps they are trying to say “Look – ‘fat’ is, after all, only an arbitrary evaluation of physical size articulating western consumer values and notions of ‘beauty’.” Perhaps they are trying to comment reflexively on bodies and embodiment in dance. Perhaps. I’m not convinced. The thing is, this clip is existing in the same discourse as their blog, where they have both repeatedly articulated conventionally heterosexist and patriarchal ideas about gender, sex and beauty.

They are not, unfortunately, fucking over the patriarchy here.

Where do I leave this discussion? With a loud sigh and a bit of head shaking, I’m afraid. I don’t really have a solid ‘solution’. I think it’s a really excellent thing that we are actually talking about this issue openly in lindy hop today. It’s something that’s bothered me as long as I’ve been dancing. I mean, there are some problematic things happening here as well. I’d be very surprised if Australian dancers actually participated in this online discussion about race and dance or engaged with it in their dancing.

[EDIT: wtf does Lisa mean by “white people more or less on their racial own”?! When the fuck are people ever on their ‘racial own’? And what does that even MEAN?]

8tracks: 10 songs by women singers that warrant a second look. Or narrowed eyes, at least.

I’ve just done a new 8tracks:

(linky, image from Shorpy).

These are just ten slower songs with women singers. Singers who have voices that make me stop and pay attention, or versions of songs that I’m just not sure about. These are probably, then, songs warranting a little suspicion. A second look, at least. Or narrowed eyes.

I put them together randomly, beginning with the Madeline Peyroux song. I saw her live a few years ago in Melbourne at a fancy theatre and she was a) really late on stage, and b) complete and utter rubbish. She really irritates me, and she fuddles her way through this really great song. That is why she’s here. Because, despite all that, the song is good because the rest of the band makes up for her mess. I’ve never played any of her stuff for dancers. Shame on me if I ever do.
Nellie Lutcher is a gun. She plays the piano.
Same with Martha Davis. This song is buttery, velvety magic.
Peggy Lee. Nuff said.
Same with Dinah Washington.
Ella Johnson: I keep forgetting her, and I shouldn’t.
Mildred Anderson, falls off the note every now and then, but her voice is amazing.
Koko Taylor will kick your arse up and down the stairs.
Molly Johnson, doing an unusual version of Summertime. I’m not sure if I like it.

(title artist album bpm year length)

Weary Blues Madeline Peyroux with Dean Parks, Larry Goldings, David Piltch, Jay Bellerose, Lee Thornburg, Scott Amendola Careless Love 92 3:41

That’ll Just About Knock Me Out Nellie Lutcher Hurry On Down 113 2:31

Kitchen Blues Martha Davis acc. by unknown BluesWomen: Girls Play And Sing The Blues 80 1947 3:05

Careless Peggy Lee and The Four Of A Kind Complete Peggy Lee and June Christy Capitol Transcription Sessions (Disc 4) 81 1947 2:06

Stormy Weather Buddy Johnson and his Orchestra with Ella Johnson Walk ‘Em 72 1951 3:19

Hey, Good Looking The Ravens and Dinah Washington Dinah Washington:the Queen Sings – Disc 4 – Please Send Me Someone To Love 132 1951 2:43

Hard Times Mildred Anderson No More In Life 67 1960 4:15

I’m Lost Mildred Anderson No More In Life 55 1960 4:36

I’m Gonna Get Lucky Koko Taylor South Side Lady (Live in Netherlands 1973) (Blues Reference) 58 1973 5:25

Summertime Molly Johnson Another Day 137 2002 4:23

Dance competitions and policing public space

(tent image from here, police image from here)

I’m really interested in the discussion of official versus community policing of public space in Chris Brown’s article ‘The Occupy Movement and the Battle for Public Space’. One point I took from this was Brown’s juxtaposition of the formal, highly ordered occupation of public space by the police and ‘official’ entities with the informal, collaborative and negotiated management of public space by community groups. I think that both types of management of public space happen in all sorts of communities, and that they’re really just two points on a broad spectrum of behaviours. I want to spend the rest of this post taking this idea and applying it to dance competitions. Competitions which can be at once ‘officially’ managed public spaces and also collaborative or informally managed public spaces. At the same time!

I’ve always been interested in the way dancers regulate the social dance floor (which I’ve always thought of as ‘public space’ or public discourse). One of my favourite topics is derision dance. Or using dance to deride someone (using the dictionary definition “contemptuous ridicule or mockery”). This can be as simple as directing a crude gesture to your opponent, but it is often more complex, involving layers of imitation, impersonation and subtler mockery. This last type is what really fascinates me. I wrote about derision dance and layers of meaning in what again?! I’m still crapping on about dance, power, etc; I used derision as a tool for understanding blackface in blackfaces and performing identity. again. (again using the idea of layers); and I talked about cake walk as an example of derision in hot and cool.

I keep coming back to the idea of dance as a forum or tool for deriding or subverting authority or an opponent because it’s a contribution to public discourse which doesn’t use words. I get a bit frustrated with work on public discourse which prioritises the written word, as there are all sorts of dodgyarse power dynamics happening there. Not all of us have literacy and linguistic competency on our side; class and race and ethnicity are pretty important factors here.

Of course, I’m not alone in talking about bodies in public space. That’s why I like that Chris Brown article. It describes the way non-verbal occupation of public space is regulated by official and community powers. When I think about dancers regulating the public space of the dance floor, I think about official ‘laws’ or guidelines like a sign forbidding aerials in a particular room for safety or heritage-building reasons. Or a more experienced or authoritative dancer telling an idiot lead to stop tossing follows into the air. But I’m also quite interested in the unspoken, unofficial and less overt management of public space in dance communities. It’s a little too far along the spectrum to ‘official’ to really illustrate my thoughts, but I want to begin with (and probably end with – as I’m off to the beach in a tick) dance competitions.

I’ve just been watching this clip from the studio we use of ‘The Crossover Popping Battle – Finals’:

There are all sorts of cool things to say about the way the studio uses Youtube and faceplant, where I found the clip, and which is so central to the studio’s promotional and community development work. But I’m not going to do that here. I want to start with the dancing itself.

… suddenly, I’m realising that this might be beyond me right this second. I want to do a close textual analysis of what is happening on the dance floor. There’s lots to be said about the mise en scene of the film itself as well. I think this type of close analysis of the dance-as-public-text requires a certain about of specialised knowledge. If you can’t read bodies as a dancer, you can’t really understand the power plays. More specifically, if you can’t read popping, you can’t really understand who’s the more proficient dancer, the intertextual and historic references in each movement, the etiquette for this sort of battle type competition. To add a few extra layers of meaning, this is a battle hosted by one particular dance studio, so you’ll see institution-specific action and ideology at work here. Not to mention the fact that these kids are from all across Asia, speaking a number of different languages as well as English. I’m a white Anglo-celtic girl living in Sydney and I only speak English. I’m going to miss most of the more nuanced physical gestures and postural moments. So my analysis is really only a beginning place, and I couldn’t possibly see all the detail at work here, least of all because I’m not into popping.

This is a pretty important point. I can’t see all the regulation and management of this public place – this moment of discourse – at work here. So I’d be bound to make mistakes. But because I am a babby, I’d probably be excused quite a few mistakes. So long as my participation improved. These guys are really friendly and welcoming, and I know I’d be cut a fair bit of slack. But eventually, even the most tolerant teachers and peers lose patience with social ineptitude and rudeness in a public forum.
Interestingly, the dancers at this studio encourage new dancers to enter battles almost from the very beginning. I’ve sat in on a casual battle, and a lot of leeway is granted for new dancers. In contrast, there’s a real sense in Australian lindy hop that only the ‘best’ dancers enter competitions, unless the competitions are for ‘up and comers’ or ‘amateurs’. Of course, definitions of ‘best’ vary between cities, and don’t match up comparatively. And, really, the most successful dancers have a very strong sense of self worth and faith in their own abilities. They really believe they are – if not the best dancers – in with a shot at becoming the best. That’s just how competition works. If you don’t really believe you have a chance, you won’t work hard in preparation, you won’t devote time and effort to the project, and you won’t bring your A-game in the final moment.
So this means that we don’t see lindy hoppers developing performance and competition skills in a relaxed, welcoming and informal setting as very new dancers. I’ve noticed the dancers at Crossover develop a real sense of self-awareness and understanding of lines and visual presentation far earlier than most lindy hoppers. They work with mirrors right from the get-go. They spend a lot more time looking up and making eye contact (particularly in battles). In brief, ‘their movements go right to the end of their finger tips’, whereas a lot of lindy hoppers don’t even really know they have hands.

So, when you go to a battle with these guys, there’s rarely an explanation of the ‘rules’, beyond the very basics. This confused me when I first saw them in action. How was judging decided? How long did dancers have to perform? How did they decide who danced in what order? You’ll find rules for competitions on websites before the event, but mostly you just have to figure them out. And of course you won’t be in the competition if you haven’t at least acquired even that much cultural knowledge.
The same sort of thing happens with lindy hop competitions. Though most of the more popular recent comps have far more implied than stated rules. In fact, there was a conscious movement away from prescriptive rules in the US at some point in the early 2000s (I can’t really remember the details, sorry). Most Australian competitions followed this American trend largely as following a trend (rather than as a critical engagement with existing competition culture) a few years later. The exception is Hellzapoppin’, which was deliberately developed as a lindy hopper-run and regulated competition advertised as having ‘no rules’. Though of course it does have rules, and these are listed quite clearly.

These rules are just a little different to other more prescriptive events like the ASDC and rock n roll or ballroom competitions. The inaugural Western Sydney Swing Dance Competition had quite strict, ballroom/rock r roll type rules, but I found it really difficult to discover much about the competition beyond this flyer. I ended up messaging the organisers on faceplant to find out more, then had a fairly long list of rules emailed to me as a pdf (which you can have a look at here). I found these rules really difficult to understand, in part because I’ve done very little competition, but also because I’m not a part of the rock n roll or ballroom dance scenes, which are far more tightly structured and formally organised than the lindy hop scene. I simply don’t have the language tools or cultural knowledge to navigate this sort of text.
The Crossover competition, though, is far more familiar. Rules for larger battles are often discussed in an informal way on faceplant, but more usually discussed in person. But learning the rules of competitions is more a matter of enculturation. The competitive space is as highly regulated as the WSDC, it’s just that the regulation is managed in a different way.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the past analysing lindy hop competition footage in close detail (‘lindy hop followers bring themSELVES to the dance; lindy hop leaders value this’ is probably the best example of how I approach this). It’s a very common practice for most lindy hoppers, and learning how to read dance (whether in footage or in person) is an ongoing process. Dancers are also on the lookout for different things. Leaders and followers often read a dance clip in quite different ways. I look for gender stuff. Someone else might be looking at shoe types. A DJ might be listening for new songs.

I’m going to get completely off-track here with a reference to a very famous dance clip.
This is a still from the Big Apple scene from Keep Punchin, featuring the Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers:

I’ve heard (second-hand, unfortunately), that Frankie Manning described this scene as a dance competition. In fact, the MC in the film introduces it as “The Big Apple contest”. Frankie explained that not only were couples competing against each other, but that individual partners were competing against each other. I’m not sure whether I’ve gotten that story right – it does come to be second-hand. But it’s an interesting idea. Competitors are working in pairs, focussing their performance on each other, as well as on those around them.
This is a bit like the Crossover battles (as far as I can tell – I’m not 100% sure about this next bit). In these battles competitors may enter as teams of two, but they dance alone, focussing their attentions on a particular member of the opposing team. There’s lots to say about focussed competition, and about how dancers in these battles turn their aggressive (yet never violent) competition on when they begin dancing, and then off when they move off the floor. I’m particularly fascinated by the way the non-dancing team member stands in a decidedly ‘I’m not dancing’ pose; they turn off their competitive dance energy, often by not making eye contact with their opponents. That’s some pretty basic non-threatening body language right there.

Right, back on-track, now…

It was quite interesting to see the new competition format for the Harlem 2011. Solo Jazz Contest held in Lithuania. It looks a lot more like the Crossover popping battle than other solo jazz comps in the lindy hop scene. How?
Firstly, here are some screenshots from those clips to illustrate my points:


(Harlem 2011, one of the rounds)


(Crossover popping battle, final)

  • The three people sitting in the middle at the back are the three judges. We see this in the Crossover battle. They don’t write things down or discuss the competitors in detail, they just point to the dancer they think should win (or cross their arms to indicate indecision). In every other lindy hop competition the judges walk around the floor with clipboards, staring intently at competitors and writing things down before going out to another room to discuss the competition and arrive at a collaborative (or comparative) decision. Sometimes there’s an audience appreciation component. ULHS has a very strong audience appreciation component.
  • Competitors can dance as long as they like to the song before ceding the floor to their competitor. This is very unlike most other competitions in the lindy hop scene. The ASDC gives each couple one minute from the beginning of a recorded song to do their thing, followed (or preceded) by an ‘all-skate’ where they share the floor with other dancers. The more organic ‘jam format’ gives dancers a phrase (or two) of music each, and each couple or dancer must enter and leave the floor at the beginning/end of that phrase. Failing to do so is read as a failure in basic musicality. The Crossover format assumes that a dancer will dance for as long as they need to bring their best shit. Failing to cede the floor is perceived as a failure to judge their audience, the tone of the competition, and a display of egotism. This is where my understanding of the format ends – I don’t know how dancers know when they should bow out, or when everyone knows too much is too much. This format was also used by the Harlem 2011 competition, and it’s interesting to watch all the clips and see how competitors, audiences, judges and MC negotiate an understanding of these rules. Collaborative meaning making or what?!
  • Audiences cheer and yell out and otherwise engage with competitors, indicating their approval, admiration, disappointment, awe and so on. This participation is often very important for a dancer making a joke, referencing an historic or iconic move or dancer, or engaging in a little derision, mockery or impersonation. Dancers are focussed on their opponents, but they rely on the audience audibly signaling their engagement with the performance. This all means that the best audiences for these sorts of competitions are also dancers.

There’s so much more to say about this. I’d like to go through and carefully analyse what’s going on in the Crossover clip, and to compare it with various lindy hop and solo clips. There are interesting things to say about the placement of DJs in the competitive space. Or how competitors in a pro or invited jack and jill comp sit in a line at the back of the competition space (they are often actually formally judging each other). This demands comparison with the way lindy hop couples line up in order along the back of the competition space waiting to enter the jam, and are far more actively engaged with the dancers currently on display. And of course, I want to talk about the way the competition space is delineated by these lines of competitors, by the audience, by lighting, by the dance floor itself.
All of these things relate to how the physical competition space is regulated and negotiated by the community, and also by official forces. The ultimate authority is the individual or organisation running the competition. Yet one of the greatest delights in watching street dance (or vernacular dance) competitions is waiting for the moments where rules and authority are deliberately contravened, or at least stretched. When judges request a rematch. When competitors physically touch each other (forbidden!) When competitors touch the audience (doubly forbidden!)

I’d also like to talk about how conversation is managed, both formally and informally. There’s lots of lovely stuff written about all-male and all-female conversation and how formal turn taking dominates all-male talk and interrupting and collaborative meaning making (eg women saying ‘oh no!’ and nodding or saying ‘yes’ regularly interrupt but do not disrupt the speaker) characterises informal all-women talk. I think of dance as discourse, and occasionally use this idea of dance as conversation to explore dance as discourse. It’s not a unique idea – dance teachers use this idea all the time. But while I might have begun thinking of dance partnership in particular as conversation with formal turn taking, I’m now a lot more interested in a model of high level partner dancing as more like collaborative, overlapping conversation. And of course, I extend this idea to include jazz music, with its sections of structured unison, its layers of individual, interrupting parts, and its moments of solo improvisation. I probably like New Orleans stuff because it favours layers of improvisation instead of carefully choreographed unison and demarcated solos.

But enough! I must swim!

Aim to misbehave. Again.

I’m doing some DJing at the upcoming MLX11 in Melbourne, and one of my sets is a blues/lindy crossover type set. In an ‘old school’ blues room. Usually these sets are a pain in the arse, but because I’m head DJ (aka BOSS OF ALL MLX DJS… i wish), I gave myself this brief:

Play slower swinging jazz and blues music. Sell it as ‘R Rated’ because that’s the sort of music you play anyway.

And I seem pretty cool with that task. So I’ve started putting together some stuff, the usual suspects. My goal is to play upenergy stuff rather than slow, quieter, mellow stuff. Again, as per usual. It’s going to be lots of fun. But I need to do some serious preparation as I’m a bit out of practice. Or rather, I don’t feel all that confident.

Alberta Hunter is kind of overdone these days, but this video reminded me of her excellence. I also think it’s kind of exciting to see an older woman up on stage talking way dirty and funny. The way she looks is really important.


Alberta Hunter singing ‘My Handy Man’ in 1981

(Try To) Write About Jazz


(Photo of Amiri Baraka by Pat A. Robinson, stoled from here).

Long time no post. I’ve been busy with a few different projects lately, most of them impeded by vast quantities of randomly-generated anxiety. I’m bossing some DJs for MLX11, I’m bossing some DJs locally, I’m sorting some solo dance practices, I’m looking at venues, I went to Church City Blues, I’m doing lots and lots of exercises to help my knees, I’m trying to improve my own DJing, and I’m working on at least two websites. They’re actually all the fun things. Also, we’ve started cooking meat at our house. The less said about that the better.

Perhaps the most challenging part of all this is trying to get my brain in gear for writing coherent sentences. More than one at a time. Ones that link up and make paragraphs. Anything more than that is really a little too ambitious right now. Writing. Why are you so demanding? The hardest thing in the world is writing properly when your brain won’t stop buzzing and fretting. Dance workshops? Actually quite good when you can’t make your brain shush. Forty minutes of slow, careful strengthening and stretching exercises every day? Quite calming, actually. But anything creative or requiring sustained creative thought – choreography, writing, editing… that shit is impossible. So here is something messy. Because it’s like learning to dance fast. If you never actually do it, you’ll never be any good at it.

Right now I’m thinking about writing about music. Again. I think it’s because I like to write about music. I’m also a woman. Wait – that last part is important (have vag will type). And because the things people write and say about music shape the way dancers and DJs think about music. And that affects the way they dance to music, which bands and DJs they hire to play their events, whether and how much they pay musicians and DJs, and what sort of music they put into the event programs. I know this is kind of old school literary studies/cultural studies/media studies stuff. And I even wrote about it in my PhD.

But now, I want to write and think about it again. Because I am organising DJs for MLX, and because I’ve noticed a clear trickle down (or bleed out?) affect from the developing online dancer discourse to the face-to-face. Yes. My PhD has come to life. Basically, Faceplant, blogs, podcast, youtube and all those other goodies are having a clear effect on face-to-face dance practice. Dancers are writing more about music (and dance), Faceplant has increased the penetration of this writing, and dancers are now reading more about music and dance. And this is having clear effects on how dance events are run. And on the interpersonal and institutional relationships and power dynamics of the international lindy hop scene. Yes, I will make that call. I can’t help it. I’m trained to see words as articulating power and ideology. And discourse as at once articulating ideology and creating it. I CAN’T HELP IT. I HAVE LEARNT TO USE MY BRAIN. ALL THIS THINKING WILL NO DOUBT RESULT IN THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION AND RISE OF OUR FELINE OVERLORDS (WORSHIP THEM).

So what I’m saying, here, is that I’m getting that niggly tingly itchy feeling in the back of my brain that tells me there’s something going on that I need to pay attention to. Some dots are being joined. Unfortunately not by my conscious, rational brain, so you’re going to have to muddle through some fairly irritatingly vague, malformed or downright wrongtown blog posts til I get it together. If this was a magazine or an academic journal you’d be reading coherent sentences. But it’s not. So you’re getting dodgy stuff, but sooner. The fact that I’m still managing all those buzzing-brain anxiety issues means that it’s going to take me longer than usual to make this all into proper paragraphs. But then, I figure it’s a goddamn improvement on the past few months that I’m actually able to set fingertips to keyboard and make with the sentencing.

Words: why are you so demanding?!

I’ve been trying to get an idea of how jazz journalism works, both in historical and contemporary contexts. I’ve read a bit about the history of jazz journalism/criticism, a lot of which is really concerning. Lots of white, middle class guys writing about jazz, to paraphrase Amiri Baraka. Very few not-men, very few not-white anyones. To quote Baraka:

Most jazz critics began as hobbyists or boyishly brash members of the American petite bourgeoisie, whose only claim to any understanding about the music was that they knew it was different; or else they had once been brave enough to make a trip into a Negro slum to hear their favorite instrumentalists defame Western musical tradition. Most jazz critics were (and are) not only white middle-class Americans, but middle-brows as well. (Baraka, Amiri, “Jazz and the white critic”, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. O’Meally, Robert G. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998: 137-142. pp 140)

Yeah! Baraka brings the smackdown! Old school 60s politics style!

What I have read has, for the most part, been really annoying. It’s kind of frustrating to see jazz studies – jazz criticism – failing to really get a grasp on gender and race politics. It’s like the 60s didn’t happen for so many of these guys. And it’s maddening to read the arguments that jazz histories emphasising black contributions are ‘racist’. Reminds me of those fuckwit people who try to argue that affirmative action policies are ‘reverse sexism’. …wait, I’m going to derail here for a bit of a rant:

IF we were all starting from the same place on the running track, it might be reverse sexism. But, dumbarse, we are working within PATRIARCHY, so affirmative action policy isn’t ‘reverse-sexism’, it’s simply an attempt to get us all at least onto the running track together. Of course, you’ve got to be a real ninja to actually pull off that sort of affirmative action effectively. So it’s ok, dickhead. Your power and privilege really aren’t in a whole lot of danger. We still have quite a bit of work to do. And anyway, most of our most important successes have been sneaky, and you haven’t noticed them. But, FYI, just like that beefcake guy in that rubbish film Crazy Stupid Love says, convincing women they’re learning to pole dance ‘for fitness’, that’s not a feminist victory. Convincing women stripping for money is empowering: that is not feminism. That’s old school sexism. So you’ve pretty much scored a point there.

…but back to my story.

Some of these jazz writer guys are entirely lacking in a sense of cultural and social context. And they really, really need to do a few introductory gender/race studies classes. Hellz, some introductory literary studies subjects.

But it’s worth having a look about at what has been written about race and class and gender and ethnicity in reference to and within jazz criticism. Queer studies? Yeah, don’t hold your breath, buddy.

So there is some critical (in the sense that these authors are engaging with the ideology and assumptions at work, rather than ‘being negative’) attention to jazz histories and jazz criticism/journalism. I’ve written a little bit about it before (in the post the trouble with linear jazz narratives + more and New Orleans jazz?), but I’m certainly not well read on this topic.


(Photo of Ellen Willis (with Bessie Smith), feminist and music journalist stoled from Ellen Willis tumblr)

That was made quite clear when I bitched (yet again) about the lack of women jazz journalists on twitter. @hawleyrose suggested I talk to @elementsofjazz (herself a woman jazz writer), who then hooked me up with Nate Chinen’s article On women in jazz (criticism) and Angelika Beener’s article Nice Work If We Can Get It: Women Writing on Jazz. Then I followed a million links from each of those articles to many more articles. The bottom line, here is that I mouthed off without researching the topic properly. I fell into that old ‘invisible women’ trap. Because I didn’t see women writing for big name jazz publications, I figured they didn’t exist. Just like that arsehat who recently bleated that there weren’t any women bloggers or tweeters writing about politics. With that bloke, the problem was a) that he defined ‘politics’ using the usual, very limited party-politics-institutions-and-polls definition and b) that he didn’t bother with bloggers and tweeters outside his usual sphere.

So my problem was a) I wasn’t looking in the right places (I was only looking in the conservative ‘official’ jazz journalism public sphere), and b) I hadn’t bothered to do much work to find those women journalists. Now I know better. And I’m delighted to be wrong. There are lots of women jazz journalists. Particularly when you broaden your definitions and include independent media, especially online media.

I think it’s worth talking about the history of jazz criticism here. And how small independent print publications were so important to the development of jazz criticism and writing from the turn of the century. But it’s also worth giving an eye (or ear) to the larger print publications like Esquire and Downbeat. I’ve written about this before, quite a few times, so I won’t go into it here (search for ‘magazines’ and you’ll find some old posts, or follow the links from More Esquire Talk).

What I do want to say, here, is that I’ve been thinking perhaps I should be asking “Are there any women writing about early jazz?” I’m wondering if the usual industrial and labour divisions of the early 20th century made it harder not only for women to get published, but for women to get read in the early days. And if there’s a resistance to writing about early jazz in the modern jazz publications and sites. Surely I’m once again voluntarily making women writers invisible. Surely. Time for more research, yes? YES!

carnivale

Carnivale is a very good HBO series set in the 30s. There are some fairly troubling story lines dealing with the Carnival’s ‘cooch dancers’ that undo a lot of the glamourising of burlesque in the 30s that goes on today. It’s an interesting point at which to enter a discussion about class, power and labour in regards to exotic dance. And women on the stage in the 30s generally.

if the music is bouncing, you’d better have a bloody good reason for just standing there

This is the theme song for this post.

Bug’s Question Of the Day is a regular thread on Faceplant (just search for ‘Bug’s question of the day’ over there). I keep typing replies and then deleting them. I want to engage, but sometimes my responses are too long or too hardcore or too stroppy for that sort of public talk. Over here, I figure I can write my replies and keep them within the context of my blog and broader thinking about dance and DJing and gender and stuff.

So here’s today’s question:

“When pulsing with an off-beat newbie as a follow, in what circumstances should one purely follow the lead versus trying to nudge the pulse towards the music with one’s own pulse? Is there a dance etiquette associated with this?”

There are various responses to this question in the thread, ranging from (and I paraphrase) ‘follows should follow’, and that’s why they should just do as this lead leads, to ‘leads leading like that drive me crazy’. This post is a story about me, and about the things I like in my lindy hop. So it is an entirely subjective narrative. You’re just going to have to deal with the fact that this does not represent the opinion of every women and every follower and ever leader out there.

I’m one of those people in the latter camp: off-beat bouncing (or pulsing – same thing pretty much) drives me nuts. Also, I tend to bounce in time, in my own way, regardless of what the lead is doing. This is mostly because I very rarely come across leaders in Sydney who actually bounce. At all. It’s also because I’M DANCING HERE and bouncing is what the music does, so that’s what I’m doing. Following is a compromise, most of the time, between what I hear in the music and what the leader leads. Which is why I have to lead. I have to, because I get so tired of not being able to actually dance to the music. And because I’m a grown up human being, I choose to dance to the music, in my way. In the immortal words of Our Lady of Pop, I choose to express myself.

If the lead is bouncing, I will make my bounce work with theirs. Sometimes this means crushing my bounce down into a small, power bounce, when I’m usually an up-in-your-grill-bouncing-like-I-just-don’t-care type bouncer. If they’re the sort of lead who knows what they’re doing and they’re not dancing, I will, begrudgingly, drop my bounce. It hurts, but I’ll do it. Because I trust them to know their shit.

Bouncing is lindy hop. If I’m not bouncing, I’m not dancing lindy hop. It makes everything easier. I tailor the bounce to suit the music – the style, the mood, the tempo, all of it. I don’t wear slippery shoes, so I fucking NEED that bounce – the push up from the floor, the coiled energy of a bent knee and engaged core. If I don’t have that bounce, dancing is going to be too much hard work. And I need all the help I can get.

There’s no fucking way I’m going to make my bounce disappear. I’m NOT going to dance badly just to suit some guy’s bullshit dancing. Yes, he’s usually a guy. But I won’t compromise for a female lead either. Too many women followers compromise their dancing to suit their lead’s. Too many of those brilliant performances in the highest profile competitions are really a performance of phenomenal following, where a follow makes some leader’s ridiculously challenging leading into badassery. Those guys think they’re fucking all that, but it’s the follow who makes that shit work. The followers are where the fucking all that is AT.

I, however, am not interested in compromising my fun to mollycoddle some guy’s ego. He’s a beginner. I’m smiling at him, I’m having fun, I’m prepared to give that sort of encouraging feedback. I’m on his side. And I’m going to give him the reassurance of a good, solid bounce that tells him where the beat is. Because he sure as fuck needs to know when he’s screwing up. Or else he’s going to go on thinking he’s all that when he’s not. And far too many leads think they’re all that, when really, they’re not. They’ve really needed a few more followers to stop fixing their fuckups so they knew they were fucking up, and had the chance to improve.

[I do know that a follow just following, doing everything the leader leads, so the leader can see how their actions affect the follow, is a good way of teaching a lead. But hells, we’re not fucking DOLLIES. We’re dancing here, too, buddy! Pay attention to your follower, especially if she’s been around a bit. You’re gonna learn something from her when she kicks your arse.]

This has too much to do with the fact that there are often too few leaders at social dancing nights, or that women dancers are too willing to compromise their own win just to score a dance with someone with a dick. Come ON,ladies! We don’t need the cock to rock!

Also, I have no patience whatsoever for leads who just stand in place, twirling the follow like a swizzle stick in a cocktail. They just stand there, occasionally doing some sort of bullshit ‘swingout’ that doesn’t include any triple steps or bounce, where the follower does all the hard work, moving eleven million times more than the lead, and generally make shit happen despite the awfulness of the lead.

I am not going to be that follow, and I’m sure as shit not going to be that lead. If you’re not bouncing, buddy, you’re not dancing lindy hop. You’re doing tango or something. Swinging jazz bounces, so you need to get your muscles active and bounce.

While I’m ranting, triple steps are what make lindy hop. They’re the syncopation in the swinging jazz. If you’re not triple stepping, you’re just stepping. And any old stooge can just step. That’s boring old babby stuff. Syncopation is hard – it demands more of your body, more of your sense of music and rhythm, and makes your dancing more. Triple steps are the difference between just 3 steps a second and more than 3 steps a second when you’re dancing 180 beats per minute. What’s your problem, non-triple-steppers? Can’t hack the pace?

Further, you mightn’t need those triple steps when you’re standing there swizzling your stick. But the follow who’s running her arse off making your shit sing does need those extra couple of steps. Be a good leader. Don’t be a lazy leader.

Finally, as a leader myself, my job is to pay attention to the follower. I’m listening to her body very carefully. I need to know where her weight is at all times, so that I can actually lead rather than dictate moves. So if she’s bouncing and I’m not, then I’m going to notice, and I’m going to fix that shit, because I’d be ashamed to discover I was out of time or not bouncing. I’m also going to pay attention to the shit she brings. If she decides she needs to swivel for 8 counts, I’m going to bloody well work with her to bring that. It’s much easier to just lead your own little set of moves without having to integrate the follower’s contributions. But I’m not a babby. Whether I get there or not, I aim for fucking brilliant. Because I’m a lindy hopper, and I’m going to be the best goddamn lindy hopper I can, and mollycoddling won’t help me get there.

NB If the Swedes can get an entire kitchen into three flat packed cartons, I’m prepared to take their advice on how to get a whole world of awesome into my lindy hop. Bouncing fo life, yo!

Yehoodi radio excitement!


(image from the Powerhouse Museum).

Finally!

Years after I was first asked, I’ve finally gotten myself organised and gotten the guts to put together a set for Yehoodi radio. I know, I know, it’s silly to get worked up about these things. But that’s how I roll. Worry, obsessing, all that shit. I’m all over it. But, mostly thanks to Jesse’s patience, I’ve gotten it happening.

During my set (which goes for about four and a half hours), I do a bit of talking and explain why I chose particular songs. I couldn’t put in everything I wanted to say (who’d have thought? I like to talk as much as I like to write!), so I’ve decided to flesh out the radio show here with some details, useful links and references.

The set is on every Thursday in June on Yehoodi radio, from 4-6:30pm 7pm-4am Thursdays, then 5am-3pm, 4-6.30pm Fridays, Sydney time. I think. Maybe check yourself?.

Firstly, Here’s the set:

1. intro2-1:59

2. Davenport Blues – Adrian Rollini and his Orchestra (Jack Teagarden) – Father Of Jazz Trombone – 136 – 1934 – 3:14

3. I Like Pie I Like Cake (but I like you best of all) – The Goofus Five (Bill Moore, Adrian Rollini, Irving Brodsky, Tommy Felline, Stan King) – Goofus Five 1924-1925 – 188 – 1924 – 3:15

4. Let’s Sow A Wild Oat – Jimmie Noone’s Apex Club Orchestra (Joe Poston, Alex Hill, Junie Cobb, Bill Newton, Johnny Wells, George Mitchell, Fayette Williams) – The Jimmie Noone Collection – 185 – 1928 – 3:03

5. Borneo – Frankie Trumbauer and his Orchestra (Bix Beiderbecke, Charlie Margulis, Bill Rank, Chet Hazlett, Irving Friedman, Lennie Hayton, Eddie Lang, Min Liebrook, Hal McDonald, Scrappy Lambert, Bill Challis) – The Complete Okeh and Brunswick Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden Sessions (1924-1936) (disc 2) – 184 – 1928 – 3:11

6. A Mug Of Ale – Joe Venuti’s Blue Four – All Star Jazz Quartets (disc 3) – 220 – 1927 – 3:07

7. Never Had A Reason To Believe In You – Mound City Blue Blowers (Jack Teagarden, Red McKenzie, Eddie Condon, Jack Bland, Pops Foster, Josh Billings) – Father Of Jazz Trombone – 180 – 1929 – 3:03

8. 1-backannounce-B – 0:36

9. I Hope Gabriel Likes My Music – Frankie Trumbauer and his Orchestra (Ed Wade, Charlie Teagarden, Jack Teagarden, Johnny Mince, Jack Cordaro, Mutt Hayes, Roy Bargy, George van Eps, Artie Miller, Stan King) – The Complete Okeh and Brunswick Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden Sessions (1924-1936) (disc 7) – 190 – 1936 – 3:14

10. I’se A Muggin’ – Le Quintette du Hot Club de France (Stéphane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt, Joseph Reinhardt, Pierre Ferret, Lucien Simoens, Freddy Taylor) – The Complete Django Reinhardt And Quintet Of The Hot Club Of France Swing/HMV Sessions 1936-1948 (disc 1) – 176 – 1936 – 3:08

11. Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone – Glenn Miller’s G.I.s (Peanuts Hucko, Mel Powell, Bernie Priven, Joe Schulman, Ray McKinley, Django Reinhardt) – Glenn Miller’s G.I.s in Paris 1945 – 182 – 1945 – 2:59

12. 2-backannounce 3 – 1:55

13. Benny’s Bugle – Benny Goodman Sextet (Cootie Williams, George Auld, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Artie Bernstein, Harry Jaeger) – Charlie Christian: The Genius of The Electric Guitar (disc 2) – 203 – 1940 – 3:06

14. Squatty Roo – Johnny Hodges and his Orchestra (Ray Nance, Lawrence Brown, Harry Carney, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Blanton, Sonny Greer) – The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition: Complete RCA Victor Recordings (disc 12) – 202 – 1941 – 2:24

15. Flying Home – Teddy Wilson Sextet (Emmett Berry, Benny Morton, Edmond Hall, Slam Stewart, Big Sid Catlett) – The Complete Associated Transcriptions – 1944 – 198 – 1944 – 4:56

16. 2B-backannounce – 0:22

17. Shortnin’ Bread – Fats Waller and His Rhythm (John Hamilton, Gene Sedric, Al Casey, Cedric Wallace, Slick Jones) – Last Years (1940-1943) (Disc 2) – 195 – 1941 – 2:41

18. Don’t Try Your Jive On Me – Una Mae Carlisle with Dave Wilkins, Bertie King, Alan Ferguson, Len Harrison, Hymie Schneider – Una Mae Carlisle: Complete Jazz Series 1938 – 1941 – 188 – 1938 – 2:52

19. That’s What You Think – Putney Dandridge and his Orchestra (Henry ‘Red’ Allen, Buster Bailey, Teddy Wilson, Lawrence Lucie, John Kirby, Walter Johnson) – Complete Jazz Series 1935 – 1936 – 185 – 1935 – 2:43

20. I’m Gonna Clap My Hands – Gene Krupa’s Swing Band (Chu Berry, Helen Ward) – Classic Chu Berry Columbia And Victor Sessions (Disc 1) – 188 – 1936 – 3:01

21. 3-backannounce 2 – 1:40

22. Warmin’ Up – Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra (Roy Eldridge, Buster Bailey, Chu Berry) – Classic Chu Berry Columbia And Victor Sessions (Disc 2) – 241 – 1936 – 3:20

23. Dancing Dogs – Mills Blue Rhythm Band (Lucky Millinder, Henry ‘Red’ Allen, Buster Bailey) – Mills Blue Rhythm Band: Harlem Heat – 228 – 1934 – 2:49

24. Lafayette – Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra (Count Basie, Ben Webster, Walter Page) – Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra (1929-1932): Basie Beginnings – 296 – 1932 – 2:47

25. Stompy Jones – Duke Ellington and his Orchestra – The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition: Complete RCA Victor Recordings (disc 07) – 200 – 1934 – 3:03

26. Stompin’ At The Savoy – Jimmy Dorsey and his Orchestra – Swingsation: Charlie Barnet and Jimmy Dorsey – 162 – 1936 – 3:12

27. 4-backannounce – 2:41

28. St. Louis Blues – Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra – Ella Fitzgerald In The Groove – 183 – 1939 – 4:46

29. Pound Cake – Count Basie and his Orchestra (Lester Young) – Classic Columbia, Okeh And Vocalion Lester Young With Count Basie (1936-1940) (Disc 2) – 186 – 1939 – 2:46

30. Page Mr. Trumpet 2:53 Pete Johnson Complete Jazz Series 1944 – 1946

31. 627 Stomp – Pete Johnson’s Band (Oran ‘Hot Lips’ Page, Edddie Barefield, Don Stovall, Don Byas, John Collins, Abe Bolar, A. G Godley) – Jazz – Kansas City Style – 153 – 1940 – 3:13

32. Shake It And Break It – Joe Turner with the Varsity Seven (Pete Johnson, Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins) – Complete Jazz Series 1938 – 1941 – 177 – 2:59

33. Some Of These Days – Julia Lee, Clint Weaver, Sam ‘Baby’ Lovett – Kansas City Star (disc 1) – 210 – 1946 – 2:02

34. Baby Heart Blues – Jay McShann and his Orchestra (Walter Brown) – Jumpin’ The Blues (disc 01) – 159 – 1941 – 2:47

35. Jumpin’ Little Woman – Tiny Kennedy – Kansas City Blues 1944-1949 (Disc 3) – 118 – 1949 – 2:37

36. Undecided Blues – Count Basie and his Orchestra (Jimmy Rushing) – Cutting Butter – The Complete Columbia Recordings 1939 – 1942 (disc 03) – 120 – 1941 – 2:56

37. 5-backannounce – 2:01

38. I’m Going To Start A Racket – Lil Green (acc. by Simeon Henry, Jack Dupree, Big Bill Broonzy, Ransom Knowling) – 1940-1941 – 104 – 1941 – 3:00

39. My Man Jumped Salty On Me – James P. Johnson’s Hep Cats (Rosetta Crawford, Mezz Mezzrow) – History of the Blues (disc 02) – 112 – 1939 – 3:23

40. Come Easy Go Easy – Rosetta Howard acc. by the Harlem Blues Serenaders (Charlie Shavers, Buster Bailey, Lil Armstrong, Ulysses Livingston, Wellman Brand, O’Neil Spencer) – Rosetta Howard (1939-1947) – 90 – 1939 – 3:03

41. Moaning The Blues – Victoria Spivey acc by Henry ‘Red’ Allen, JC Higginbotham, Teddy Hill, Luis Russell – Henry Red Allen And His New York Orchestra (disc 1) – 97 – 1929 – 3:07

42. 6-backannounce 2 – 1:29

43. Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl – Janet Klein – Come Into My Parlor – 94 – 1998 – 2:12

44. You Got to Give Me Some – Midnight Serenaders (David Evans, Dee Settlemier, Doug Sammons, Garner Pruitt, Henry Bogdan, Pete Lampe) – Magnolia – 187 – 2007 – 4:02

45. Old Joe’s Hittin’ The Jug – Rhythm Club All Stars – Introducing The Rhythm Club All Stars – 269 – 2008 – 2:43

46. Red Hot Band – Bob Hunt’s Duke Ellington Orchestra – What A Life! – 237 – 1999 – 2:40

47. Looking Good But Feeling Bad – Les Red Hot Reedwarmers – Apex Blues – 272 – 2007 – 3:52

48. 7-backannounce – 3:23

49. I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise – Rufus Wainwright (I think singing with the Manhattan Rhythm Kings, or perhaps Vince Giordano’s band?) – The Aviator – 142 – 3:12

50. Let’s Do It – Terra Hazelton (feat. Jeff Healey, Marty Grosz, Dan Levinson, Vince Giordano) – Anybody’s Baby – 126 – 2004 – 4:28

51. Some Of These Days – Midnight Serenaders (David Evans, Dee Settlemier, Doug Sammons, Garner Pruitt, Henry Bogdan, Pete Lampe) – Sweet Nothin’s – 255 – 2009 – 3:29

52. Chinatown, My Chinatown – Hot Club Of Cowtown – Swingin’ Stampede – 256 – 1998 – 3:02

53. Stay A Little Longer – Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys – The Tiffany Transcriptions (vol 2) – 232 – 3:07

54. 8-backannounce – 1:14

55. Chimes at the Meeting (feat. Washboard Chaz) – Ophelia Swing Band – Swing Tunes of the 30’s & 40’s – 253 – 1977 – 3:23

56. Digadoo – Firecracker Jazz Band – The Firecracker Jazz Band – 247 – 2005 – 5:20

57. Puttin’ on the Ritz – Mona’s Hot Four (Dennis Lichtman, Gordon Webster, Cassidy Holden, Nick Russo, Jesse Selengut, Dan Levinson, Tamar Korn) – Live at Mona’s – 185 – 2009 – 7:49

58. Better Off Dead – Linnzi Zaorski and Delta Royale (Charlie Fardella, Robert Snow, Matt Rhody, Seva Venet, Chaz Leary) – Hotsy-Totsy – 146 – 2004 – 3:51

59. 9-backannounce – 1:31

60. Do You Call That A Buddy – Chris Tanner’s Virus – With Her Dixie Eyes Blazin’ – 119 – 2001 – 6:17

61. The Love Me Or Die – C.W. Stoneking – Jungle Blues – 153 – 2008 – 3:55

62. Blue Leaf Clover – Firecracker Jazz Band – The Firecracker Jazz Band – 111 – 2005 – 4:59

63. That Too, Do – Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra (Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing) – Moten Swing – 123 – 1930 – 3:20

64. 10-backannounce – 2:59

65. It’s Tight Like That – Jimmie Noone’s Apex Club Orchestra (Joe Poston, Alex Hill, Junie Cobb, Bill Newton, Johnny Wells, George Mitchell, Fayette Williams) – The Jimmie Noone Collection – 144 – 1928 – 2:49

66. Truckin’ – Henry ‘Red’ Allen and his Orchestra – Henry Red Allen ‘Swing Out’ – 171 – 1935 – 2:54

67. Murder In The Moonlight – Red McKenzie and his Rhythm Kings (Eddie Farley, Mike Riley, Slats Young, Conrad Lanoue, Eddie Condon, George Yorke, Johnny Powell) – Classic Sessions 1927-49 (Volume 2) – 193 – 1935 – 2:55

68. Joe Louis Stomp – Bill Coleman, Edgar Currance, Jean Ferrier, Oscar Aleman, Eugene d’Hellemes, Hurley Diemer – Bill Coleman In Paris 1936-1938 – 213 – 1936 – 3:14

69. Beau Koo Jack – Louis Armstrong and his Savoy Ballroom Five (Fred Robinson, Jimmy Strong, Don Redman, Earl Hines, Mancy Cara, Zutty Singleton, Alex Hill) – Hot Fives and Sevens – Volume 3 – 246 – 1928 – 3:01

70. Blues (My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me) – Wilbur De Paris and his Rampart Street Ramblers – Dr. Jazz Vol. 7 – 153 – 5:35

71. St. Louis Blues – Sidney Bechet and his New Orleans Feetwarmers (Vic Dickenson, Don Donaldson, Wilson Meyers, Wilbert Kirk) – The Sidney Bechet Story (disc 3) – 131 – 1943 – 4:49

72. 11-backannounce – 1:54

73. Reckless Blues – Louis Armstrong and his All Stars (Velma Middleton, Trummy Young Edmund Hall, Billy Kyle, Everett Barksdale, Squire Gersh, Barrett Deems) – The Complete Decca Studio Recordings of Louis Armstrong and the All Stars (disc 06) – 88 – 1957 – 2:30

74. Jealous Hearted Blues – Carol Ralph – Swinging Jazz Portrait – 80 – 2005 – 3:48

75. You Help Your New Woman – Di Anne Price – 88 Steps to the Blues – 87 – 2009 – 4:36

76. What Kind Of Man Is This? – Koko Taylor – South Side Lady (Live in Netherlands 1973) (Blues Reference) – 116 – 1973 – 4:08

77. Sweet Home Chicago – David “Honeyboy” Edwards – Sun Records – The Blues Years, 1950 – 1958 CD4 – 112 – 3:01

78. Blues Stay Away – George Smith – Kansas City – Jumping The Blues From 6 To 6 – 82 – 1955 – 3:10

79. Evil Woman – Lonnie Johnson – The Bluesville Years Volume 11: Blues Is A Heart’s Sorrow – 104 – 2:34

80. Inform Me Baby – Walter Brown – Kansas City Blues 1944-1949 (Disc 2) – 71 – 1949 – 2:59

81. I Ain’t No Ice Man – Cow Cow Davenport with Joe Bishop, Sam Price, Teddy Bunn, Richard Fullbright – History of the Blues (disc 02) – 89 – 1938 – 2:51

82. Hamp’s Salty Blues – Lionel Hampton and his Quartet – Lionel Hampton Story 3: Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop – 86 – 1946 – 3:10

83. 12-backannounce 2 – 1:00

84. Kitchen Blues – Martha Davis – BluesWomen: Girls Play And Sing The Blues – 80 – 1947 – 3:05

85. Fine And Mellow – Mal Waldron and the All-Stars (Billie Holiday, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Milt Hinton) – The Sound Of Jazz – 79 – 1957 – 6:22

86. Rocks In My Bed – Ella Fitzgerald acc. by Ben Webster, Paul Smith, Stuff Smith, Barney Kessel, Joe Mondragon, Alvin Stoller – Ella Fitzgerald Day Dream: Best Of The Duke Ellington Songbook – 68 – 1956 – 3:59

87. 13-backannounce – 1:19

88. Willow Weep For Me – Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis (g), Ray Brown (b), Buddy Rich – Ella And Louis Again – 90 – 1957 – 4:21

89. No Regrets – Cecile Mclorin Salvant and the Jean-Francois Bonnel Paris Quintet – Cecile – 134 – 2010 – 4:05

90. Sweet Lorraine – June Christy and The Kentones – Complete Peggy Lee and June Christy Capitol Transcription Sessions (Disc 1) – 138 – 1945 – 2:34

91. Joog, Joog – Duke Ellington and his Orchestra – Duke Ellington and his Orchestra: 1949-1950 – 146 – 1949 – 3:01

I put together this set with an ear to transitioning smoothly between songs. I planned it as though it was a real set I was playing for dancers. But I also thought about who was in the bands and about grouping particular styles.

1
– Adrian Rollini’s band featuring Jack Teagarden. One of my go-to songs.
– Goofus Five (featuring Adrian Rollini). My preferred version, and one Trev put me onto.
– Jimmy Noone: for whom I have great, towering feelings.
– Trumbauer’s band featuring Bix Beiderbecke and Eddie Lang, doing my FAVOURITE SONG, ‘Borneo’.
– Joe Venuti’s band.
– The Mound City Blue Blowers, featuring Jack Teagarden, and doing ‘St Louis Blues’ on youtube.
– Jack Teagarden. Beautiful voice, gorgeous trombone, not at all beautiful to look at. Would marry.

2
– Trumbauer’s band again, with more Jack Teagarden

small groups:
– Quintette of the Hot Club of France featuring Django Reinhardt.
– Glenn Miller’s G.I.s featuring Django Reinhardt and other Americans, in Paris.
– Bennie Goodman’s sextet (Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Cootie Williams)
-> the importance of Goodman’s small groups lie in their music, but also in the fact that they were mixed-race. Check out this cool clip of one of Goodman’s small groups’ performances.
– Johnny Hodges and his Orchestra – Duke Ellington’s small group, featuring Johnny Hodges. Cootie Williams played in Ellington’s band.

2b
– Teddy Wilson Sextette. Massive love for Teddie Wilson. The iconic song ‘Flying Home’ by Teddie Wilson’s sextette, featuring Slam Stewart, part of Slim and Slam, silly vocal kings.
– Fats Waller doing ‘Shortnin’ Bread’, one of my faves.

3
kicking bands with great vocals:
– Una Mae Carlisle with a small group (Carlisle recorded other songs with Slam Stewart, with Zutty Singleton (who played with Fats Waller a bit) and Lester Young (from Basie’s band!)). The piano intro reminds me of Fats Waller, and the muted trumpet solo is very Waller small band-like.
-> Carlisle as one of the first swing vocalists I liked when I started dancing.
– Putney Dandrige, with a brilliant band featuring Henry ‘Red’ Allen, Buster Bailey, Teddy Wilson, Lawrence Lucie, John Kirby and Walter Johnson. Carlisle also recorded with Buster Bailey and John Kirby. Dandridge is interesting because later in his career he was obviously imitating Fats Waller’s vocal style. And not doing a good job.
– Helen Ward singing with Gene Krupa’s band, which also features Chu Berry.

4
Bigger bands, with musicians in common:
– Teddy Wilson again, with Chu Berry in this band, as well as Buster Bailey and Roy Eldridge
– the Mills Blue Rhythm Band (with Lucky Millinder, Henry ‘Red’ Allen, Buster Bailey), doing hot hot jazz
– Bennie Moten’s band featuring Count Basie, Ben Webster, Walter Page, playing a familiar song ‘Lafayette’. I love this Kansas action.
– A Duke Ellington wonderment – my favourite Ellington song

Big band classic swing WIN:
– Jimmy Dorsey doing the BEST version of ‘Stompin at the Savoy’, my favourite shim sham song. Remember Dorsey was in the Mound City Blue Blowers at one point.
– a brilliant version of another common song, ‘St Louis Blues’, by Ella Fitzgerald (not singing) with what was Chick Webb’s band. Played live at the Savoy (hence the link to ‘Stompin at the Savoy’).

Kansas!
– Basie’s band playing ‘Pound Cake’. A classic example of solid, wickedly good Basie big band lindy hopping win. Basie of course turned up earlier, but this is the classic ‘old testament’ Basie sound, not Moten stuff, and not small Goodman Group stuff. The rhythm section is where it’s at in this song.

– Pete Johnson. YES.
– Pete Jonson AGAIN, this time featuring Hot Lips Page doing ‘627 Stomp’. Read about the 627 Local here.
– Big Joe Turner (with Pete Johnson I think)! doing ‘Shake It and Break It’, a song I love because of this performance
– Julia Lee! Brilliant home-recording session
– Jay McShann! Walter Brown! Kansas city win!
– Tiny Kennedy!
– Count Basie with Jimmy Rushing. Singing waiters. Wonderful.

5
Slower music, possibly for blues dancing. Raggedy, kick your arse vocals, attitudinal singers, excellent bands:
– Lil Green. Getting into crime to fund a better lifestyle.
– James P Johnson’s Hep Cats with Mezz Mezzrow, but more importantly, ROSETTA CRAWFORD. Cut him if he stands still, shoot him if he runs
– Rosetta Howard (!!) with the Harlem Blues Serenaders, band of amazingness: Charlie Shavers, Buster Bailey, Lil Armstrong, Ulysses Livingston, Wellman Brand, O’Neil Spencer. Having money, not having money. Whatevs.
– Victoria Spivvey, who will pwn you. With a brilliant band. Henry Red Allen. And singing a song about getting dirty that feels as though it’s a song about getting dirty.

6
Modern bands, heavy on the high energy fun (after Klein):
– Janet Klein on ukelele, defusing things with the usually-hot ‘Sugar in my bowl’
– Midnight Serenaders. Favourite modern band. Guitarist used to be in Helmet. Yes. Light, bouncing band of fun.
– Old Joe’s Hitting the Jug, not the version we know by Stuff Smith (which features in this clip of Bethany and Stephan, my current favourite lindy hopping couple), a version by Danny Glass’s band of brilliance.
– Bob Hunt. Ellington win. This song is excellently exciting fun.
– Les Red Hot Reedwarmers French. From France. Doing wonderful Jimmie Noone wonderfulness. Exciting!

7
– SQUEEEE Rufus Wainwright Stairway to Paradise. Earworm. Camp. Wonderment. Listening at home, I love to follow this song up with Wainwright doing Cohen, fucking up your gender binaries.
– Terra Hazelton, with a band of OMG GOOD. Singing a silly song with lots of innuendo, written by Cole Porter, who was queer as fuck, so a lovely campy follow up to Wainwright. Vince Giordano plays on this version, and his band was also in the Aviator, where I found the Wainwright song.
– More Midnight Serenaders. I love the first line the most. Male vocals. Lovely. I like comparing this to the Julia Lee version.
– The male singer in the Hot Club of Cowtown has a gorgeously sexy style. I always think of him when I listen to that version of ‘Some of these Days’. I like the HCC a lot. I like this western swing treatment of a hot jazz favourite. This band featured the bass player from Casey McGill’s band.
– Of course I had to follow up with Bob Wills, western swing king. The HCC have a new album out which is all Bob Wills songs. I really love this song ‘Stay a Little Longer’, and this is a great version. But this is a better version.

8
– a band I know nothing about, doing a GREAT version of a song I love, ‘Chimes at the meeting’ by Willie Bryant’s band. Teddie Wilson played with Willie Bryant’s band. Sister Pork Chop. This is a rowdy, fiddle-heavy song that connects nicely to the HCC and Bob Wills.
– Firecracker Jazz Band, who are. This is a top fun version of a very common, famous song. The trumpeter Je Widenhousei was/is in the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Anyway, Katherine Whalen (of the Zippers) reminds me, vocally, of Tamar Korn.
– The Cangelosi Cards (featuring Tamar Korn) do a version of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’, but I think this rowdy live version is better. It features Gordon Webster on piano, and Jesse Selengut. This song is long and I’ve never played it for dancers. It is really really good.
– the vocals of this next song are interesting, and are a nice link to Korn’s interesting vocal style. ‘Better Off Dead’ is kind of of a tongue-in-cheekly-miserable song about being in a shitty relationship.

9
Australian content! Modern bands! Necrophilia! Darkness!
– Chris Tanner’s Virus. Continuing the theme of rubbish relationships. What a terrible friend.
– C W Stoneking. More awful relationships. Stoneking’s album featured some of the Virus people. They are all Melbourne folk. I love this song, but I don’t play it for dancers. I love the misery of it. See those Virus/Melbourne/Stoneking band people in Stoneking’s video for ‘Jungle Blues’ which has good misery too.
– Firecracker Jazz Band again! Not Australian. A song that feels dark, but gets a bit lighter. This is good dancing fun.
– ‘That Too Do’ is another Moten song featuring Basie, but also Jimmie Rushing. It also feels a bit dark and unhappy, but it a kind of winking-at-the-audience way.

10
silly, older songs, with vocals:
– Moten leads me to Noone. Noone. I love him. This is a brilliant little song. Is it about sex? Is it about being awesome? I’m too clueless to know. This is fun.
– Best version of ‘Truckin’. Back to Henry Red Allen. I really like it for the laconic, really laid back lyrics. They’re singing about a dance craze with very little vocal enthusiasm.
– ‘Murder in the Moonlight’ is silly. Feels like the Mound City Blue Blowers, has some of the same musicians.

Smaller bands, smelling of New Orleans:
– Then Bill Coleman, recording in France, with Oscar Aleman (not Django!). Remember those other French songs?
– Louis Armstrong and his Savoy Ballroom Five. This is hot. Hot. Hot. And this band features Zutty Singleton, Don Redman, of course, and Alex Hill, who was in the Jimmie Noone band.
– a version of ‘Blues My Naughty Sweety Gave to Me’. But by Wilbur de Paris and his Rampart Street Ramblers. It says ‘New Orleans’ to me, and that’s Louis Armstrong. de Paris was in Armstrong’s band, Jelly Roll’s band AND Ellington’s band. He’s glue. This is a good transcript version of a favourite.
– another version of ‘St Louis Blues’. By Bechet. New Orleans, yes.

11
Slower, blues dancing music:
Australian content!
…not really. Here’s what I said about this song in the Yehoodi show:

Well, this next song isn’t by an Australian musician, it’s by Louis Armstrong and his small group, including Velma Middleton, but Louis Armstrong is kind of an interesting example because Louis Armstrong Australia in about the mid-fifties, and between about 1928 and some date in the 50s, black musicians were banned from touring in Australia. And this was partly because Australia was a pretty racist place at the time, and there were fears that black musicians were bringing drugs and sex and misbehaviour to the innocent white folk of Australia. But in actual fact, it was probably more to do with pressures from the local musicians’ union, who didn’t want all these badarse musicians coming from the States and taking all their gigs.

I explore this topic in this post.

– Carol Ralph. Australian. Reminds me of Velma Middleton, from Armstrong’s small groups.
– Di Anne Price. You better help your new woman (get out of town). This is the sort of sentiment I like in my blues dancing music. More hi-fi, modern music.
– Koko Taylor. A little more soul. Assertive, sexually confident. Perhaps a little cranky.
– Sweet Home Chicago. Geetar. A natural progression from the feel of Taylor’s song.

Slower, dirtier male vocal blues:
– George Smith. Harmonica and guitar.
– Lonnie Johnson singing Evil Woman, a song women usually sing. I like the line about being too evil to sleep straight in her bed. I chose this version for the way it links up the the male vocals and sparse piano sound of the next song.
– Walter Brown (excellent voice!). Male vocal blues. More upsetting women.
– Cow Cow Davenport singing a brilliant song. All innuendo.
– Lionel Hampton’s band doing an uncharacteristically slow and mellow number. I like the feel of this one.

12
More blues. Serious. Groovier:
– Martha Davis, doing a wonderfully velvety song about ‘working’ for a man. A sparser style, which links us from the previous song quite well.
– …which sets us up nicely for Billie Holiday’s quite intense, but equally velvety classic live performance. You can see her singing it in this clip.
– Ella singing ‘Rocks in My bed’. I never find her all that convincing when she sings sadder songs – she always sounds like she’s smiling. This recording is interesting because it features Stuff Smith. It’s also really nice and slow and rocking.

13
– A song by Louis Armstrong with a band including Oscar Peterson from an album called ‘Ella and Louis Again’. Feels just like the Ella song. I’m not usually a fan of Armstrong singing, but sometimes he gets it just right. I like the way he lightens things up a bit.

Slightly faster, groovier, velvety stuff:
– Cecil McLorin Salvant, a very young French singer doing a sort-of-Billie-Holiday type performance. She has really cool delivery.
– I love this version of ‘Sweet Lorraine’, a song I love a lot. I like the way it’s often sung by women, and is a love song for a woman. This song is a bit older, and it’s a nice segue to a slightly earlier feel.
– And, finally, Duke Ellington’s band with vocals, doing a song I regularly use to shift gears while DJing, from chillaxed groovy back to chunkier old school.