I’m listening to a Black Eyed Peas album on itunes (Behind the Front, actually) for the first time, and it strikes me that I listen to jazz in a very different way to other music. No, let’s get specific. When I’m listening to jazz on itunes via my laptop when I’m using my laptop (as opposed to when I’m hanging around the house doing other things and incidentally listening to music from my laptop via the stereo), my brain and listening bits work in a particular way.
I ask myself: “could you dance to this?” Well, it’s not actually a conscious thing, it’s more of a response. Does this song fulfill the following criteria:
– swinging timing (as opposed to latin or bebop or unswing or whatever)
– does this song make me want to move my arse?
– is the musicianship of a decent standard?
– is the song ‘interesting’ – ie does it offer me musical inspiration for said moving of arse, or do I immediately wander off to find a nectarine to eat?
and then:
– how is the quality of this song – would it cut it on a shitty sound system, and are the basic elements (rhythm section, vocals, etc) distinguishable as individual elements? In other words, can you hear the beat, can you hear the words, does the music have ‘levels’ or is it a flat ‘monotone’ mess?
I also have a few other criteria which are entirely idiosyncratic:
– is it ‘new testament’ – ie 50s or later swinging jazz? If so, does it make me want to gag or is it bearable?
– is it a ‘new band’ (ie someone from the contemporary music scene), and if it is, are they worth worrying about?*
– is this a ‘better’ version of a song I already have?
– is it ‘swinging lindyhop’, ‘groovy swinging lindyhop’, ‘groovy lindyhop’, ‘swinging blues’, ‘groovy swinging blues’, ‘groovy blues’, ‘charleston’, ‘swinging charleston’, ‘slow drag’, ‘kissing song’ or some other animal?
– what’s the bpm? Is it too slow to lindy hop to on an average dance night? Or would you put it in the ‘blues’ folder?
and, most importantly
– how many stars?
This is a crazy way to think about music. Listening to the Black Eyed Peas, I had a momentary instinct to assess the ‘danceability’. Sheesh. Bpm? Who gives a fuck!
And of course, all this is in part of my ongoing issue with DJing.
I have half thought about DJing, but frankly, the main reasons I’ve abstained so far (in order of importance):
1. we only have one decent DJed dance night a week, and only one a fortnight which are at least 2 hours long (2.5 for the former, 2.5-3 for the second). And we call ourselves the biggest swing scene in the country? Fuck – even Hobart has more social dancing action. At any rate, this paucity of DJed social dancing action means that I’m reluctant to waste it standing in front of my laptop playing my favourite dancing songs to a bunch of people who aren’t me.
2. if I’m not there to dance, I’m not particularly interested in being there. I’m not terribly interested in the company of most swing dancers, and I’m certainly not interested in trying to hold a conversation with them in a noisy room where I can only guarantee their attention for 3 minutes. If that. Added to that, our two regular DJed spaces are shitty. The weekely venue is a shitbox – the sort of rank nightclub you’d go to when you were 15 because you could get in. And score some low grade speed while posing for amateur porn. If you were so inclined. The other joint is better, but it’s a dance studio, superhot and overcrowded. Not so cool.
3. the few times I have DJed, I’ve nearly died of boredom. Sure, there are interesting aspects – keeping people on the floor, choosing songs to suit the ‘mood’ or tempo you’ve got going, etc etc. But really, at the end of the day, you’re just playing a bunch of songs for other people to dance to. See point 1.
4. Most people on the floor aren’t particularly interested in excellent swinging jazz. They’d be just as happy dancing to Royal Crown Revue as Basie. This sticks in my craw. It’s even more infuriating when I think of the fact that most of the teachers teaching these people feel the same way – and teach with that crap. Frankly, I couldn’t handle that shit.
I feel – obviously erroneously – that you should dance because the music tells you to. And it should tell you how to dance. For me, if I’m looking to dance lindy hop or charleston or whatever, I need jazz. With lindy hop, I need swinging jazz because the structure of the music is reflected in the dance form. An 8-count basic, where a 4-count rhythm is played out first favouring one foot, then favouring the second. That same 8-count basic is a balance between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ position. ‘Closed’ roughly correlates with scored music, and ‘open’ with improvised, unscored music. The execution of this basic – the steps – involves bounce. And bounce is swinging tempo embodied: it’s about accent and emphasis and delay on particular terms. And all that with a partner on a crowded dance floor – which is, of course, the equivalent to the band.
So not giving a shit about what music you dance to is – to me – a fundamental declaration of a misunderstanding of the way this dance works. Which is fine… but it’s also INFURIATING!
Reasons I would consider DJing:
1. the music I hear when I go out is so ordinary, I consider a civic duty to pull out the good shit. There are problems with this: I don’t know what I’m doing and am just as likely to fuck it up as work it properly for the crowd. But I am attracted to the idea of reminding people of the good stuff, and generally contributing to a musical discourse which expands beyond goddamn Royal Crown Revue. Gotta be in it to win it, I guess. Or, if it’s broke, get off your arse and fix it rather than bitching til someone else does.
2. I really like the music. So hearing it on a big sound system rocks. Though most of our systems suck (esp in the night club joint), and I don’t know how to fix it to make it sound better.
3. You get paid. Not much, but seeing how poor I am at the moment, anything is better than nothing. And it’d get me essential items such as the Slim Gaillard Proper Box set.
4. It’d be a good way to get skilled up. And I love learning how to do new things.
At any rate, this ongoing dilemma/conflict/internal discussion has led to my insane approach to ‘listening’ to music. I go about this complicated system of classification in part with an eye to DJing at some point in the future, but also because it’s certainly been an advantage when it comes to getting music together to work on dance, whether I’m working alone or with other people. I’m also a little ob-con, and this sort of crazy classification is pretty much an extension of my crazy laundry obessiveness, or my deep passion for tidying and arranging glass jars full of ingredients in the kitchen.
It has also been somewhat self perpetuating – the more interest I take in the music, the more interested in the music I become. I’ve learnt more about swinging jazz and jazz generally in the last year than ever before. I have about 400 albums in various forms that I’d consider ‘danceable’, I’ve discovered new artists that I really love, and come to understand and be interested in artists I hadn’t really liked before. The technical knowledge I had from endless singing/performing/classes at school has been expanded and I’ve really developed a greater interest in the relationship between musical form and dance – particularly in terms of the relationship between improvisation and scored music within a song, how this is a reflection of relationships between musicians in a band, the bandleader’s approach, and then – of course – the ways a dancer may respond to all this.
I wouldn’t say that all this has made me a better dancer – you can’t be a better dancer if you don’t dance, and sitting on your clack fussing over your itunes doesn’t quite equate to dancing. Listening to music with this critical ear is definitely not the same as the way I listen to music when I’m dancing. When I’m dancing I’m not ‘conscious’ of musical structure. In fact, I rely on my ability to unconsciously follow the structure of the music. If I had to actually count out the bars or sets of ‘8’ in a phrase while I was dancing I’d be stuffed. I have noticed, though, that my responses to the music have changed and gotten more complex since I’ve been more into the music.
At the end of the day, however, your ability to actually make the music visible – to embody the music – is limited by basic stuff like dance fitness, body awareness (ie do you actually know how to move your arm to make that shape or relax/tense that muscle?), response time, connection with your partner (and ability to influence that connection) and so on. All that shit is really the product of:
1. dancing
2. aerobic fitness
3. experience in your body – dancing, sports, whatever
4. physical experimentation – trying shit out
Sitting there in front of you your itunes you’re not really going to become a better dancer. Nor will you by watching other people dance. You need to move your arse.
Does this lead me to a kind of anxiety about DJing? Perhaps – if I’m sitting there DJing half the night, will my dancing go down in quality? Will I lose fitness? I think it’s very likely. But, having said that, if I’m sitting there disgusted by the music, won’t my dancing suffer the same fate?
So I guess I’ll just continue with my ob-con musical classification. And collection. All those songs are really just specimens in my collection, I guess.
*there seems an instinct to grasp at any contemporary artist who plays anything even remotely ‘swinging’ and then foist it on vulnerable dancers in the swing scene. Just because Harry Connick Jnr is singing a ‘swing song’, don’t mean it necessarily swings, or is even half worth dancing to. Further, the standard of most contemporary swinging jazz artists simply doesn’t match the old skool doods – we have no Basie or Ellington or Armstrong or Holiday or Fitzgerald. They’re all over there in indy rock, thanks.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
every girl needs a bike
Galaxy has been reading Life of Pi. I’m reading Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton. It’s monstrously huge, and full of complicated politics which I’m having trouble remembering from Pandora’s Star. Oh well. I have some issues with his gender politics at times, but I do love the galaxy-spanning intrigue…
oh wait… back to the other thing I was writing about…
So, Galaxy’s reading Life of Pi:
I didn’t agree with Pi’s stance on agnosticism:
It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gesthamane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. … But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
Perhaps the … quote explains why I walk; and I suppose that public transport could sometimes be described as immobile. I wouldn’t, however, characterise doubt as static. I think doubt is the opposite of stasis. Doubt is a state of never arriving; surely it’s resting after the arrival at an imagined certainty that produces inactivity?
I’m agreeing with these points – the bit about pt as immobile and resting in/with/after certainty as producing inactivity.
… although, on the latter point, I’d probably like to note that certainty can be galvanising. I’m never more productive than when I’ve arrived at a plan and am set to work on it. And sometimes, doubt can be paralysing: maybe it’s selfdoubt that the paralysing force, though? There’s nothing more likely to make me hesitate than a crisis of selfdoubt or indecision. Do, don’t, do, don’t: I’m far more likely to do if I haven’t paused to panic over a particular thought, over and over again in that sort of heart-pounding anxiety that makes you worry you’re going to gag on your own pulse.
Ok, but back to the pt point. But I’m going to wander off, on a tangent, really, rather than addressing the serious question in Galaxy’s post, or seeking out Pi to test the source.
I’m not so much a walker as a bike rider, and I know the greatest appeal for bike riding is the independence. I know when I’ll get somewhere, and how, and I get no end of satisfaction from being fit enough and physically coordinated enough to get from one place to another in the inner city without getting killed or dying of exhaustion. For me, getting myself about – being master of my own mobility – is exhilarating and energising. It’s independence as empowerment, and the empowerment of knowing exactly what you’re physically capable of. The same sort of thrill I get from doing something difficult at yoga (usually upside down and involving ropes), the sort of thrill I get from a stream of useful and clever thought (sigh – I need that now, mid-chapter), the sort of thrill that is the greatest motivating and mobilising force I know.
There is no greater inertia than that being satisified that you couldn’t do something, or that you don’t care that you don’t know whether you could do something or not.
Sitting on a tram, at the mercy of traffic and power outages and rampaging ticket collectors, there’s no way to prove that I could opt out of various physical and economic limitations. I know there are folks who feel that fare evasion is tactical resistance and all, but – personally – I think it’s far more exhilarating to zip past a halted tram on the downhill slope of Swanston Street, feeling like I’m going a million miles an hour, muscles quivering in that really working way, riding my endorphines and not prefacing every journey in terms of conflict or resistance. In this way simply choosing another way to get around is exciting and stimulating, but also productive and valuable.
For me, to ride my bike (or to walk, though riding is more exciting – more endorphines, greater speed, the thrill of mechanical skill and mastery, etc etc etc) is to choose to find out what I am physically capable of. I’ve always thought that girls wearing skirts for their school uniform functioned as a limitation on their physical (and social?) activity. In choosing to ride my bike, I also choose to sacrifice impractical fashion for pragmatic trousers or shorts, sensible necklines, resilient hairstyles, tough and comfortable shoes, limited jewellry and so on.
And not having to concern myself with challenges to my modesty that a skirt on a bike offer, or the ridiculousness of heeled shoes on pedals frees me to enjoy the experience, to take satisfaction in my independence, to take pride in my abilities, and to seek out further physical challenges. To see just what I am capable of in my body, and on my own terms.
I wonder, though, if physical ability is really another way of talking about physical control as a way of gaining social control – of the self, in the case of women? I know that eating disorders are read by many therapists as a means by which young men and women gain control of their lives, symbolically. Exercise, likewise.
I think the key point there, however, is when choosing physical control becomes and obession and ultimately adversely affects further rights to choose and to be independent: damaging health to the point of illness or death; damaging a social or cultural life to the point of isolation and loneliness.
I don’t doubt that my riding a bike is a manifestation of my feminist sensitivities. Every girl needs a bike?
david bigword
Describing my hair as looking as if it had just been plopped onto my head, David Bigword (as he insists I referr to him, following his recent exploration of the English Language) advocated a hair cut. I will comply – I can’t hack the mass no longer.
cultural relevence and dance
Here’s something I wrote about cultural relevence and swing dance a while back. I think it was posted on Swing Talk. I’m reposting it here because it’s got some interesting points that I want to hang onto and think about with the chapter I’m writing atm.
[quote begins]
In terms of music: one of the neat things about Afro-American vernacular jazz dance is that it was ‘made’ in tandem with the music – that’s why live music is important. Jazz totally leans on improvisation. So jazz dances do too. Being able to improvise is as important for us as dancers as it is for jazz musicians: it tests us. It pushes us to our creative limits. It makes the whole thing harder and so much funner.
So if I assume that the original line was: “the way vernacular dance maintains its relevancy to ordinary people’s lives. Dance styles and fashions stick around because they have use-value – they respond to the culture of the day”. You could also use ‘society’ instead I guess.
You know, I’ve thought about this a lot lately. It’s something that has relevancy to me as a dancer, and to me as a feminist researcher looking at issues of power and discourse and ideology in a dance culture.
nerdy academic rambling
As a cultural studies person, I believe that ‘culture’ …
– ie ‘stuff’ like texts (ie music and songs and pictures and paintings and sculpture and story and dances and magazines and television programs and film clips and so on)
and ‘practices’ (stuff we do – like talk about things or share clips or publish magazines or produce paintings or make clothes or whatever)
…is a nice way to look at what a society or culture is thinking and doing at a particular moment in time. As a cultural studies person I tend to be interested in ‘now’ – I’m not a historian, but sometimes I might do historical research. I don’t use historical research techniques. Nor do I use a sociological or anthropological techniques in the same way as people in those fields do.
I assume – as a feminist cultural studies researcher – that the relationships between people – ‘politics’ are indicated or represented in cultural ‘stuff’ and ‘practices’. So if I examine a song from 1935 I could make some guesses about the language and culture of the time. For these guesses to be more productive, I’d look at this text in context. So I’d look at other songs, I’d do interviews with people of the 30s, I’d read newspapers of the day, I’d read academic and popular work of and about that time. I guess that’s what I’m doing with my thesis: I’m looking at how the media we produce (be that dance or online) can be read to identify ideological discourse.
So I think it’s really neat that Afro-American vernacular dance builds this idea of cultural relevancy into its very structure… I mean, all dances do, but Afro-American vernacular dance totally DIGS it and positions it as very important. Hell, the swingout is revolutionary because it broke open the highly structured European partner dance form and gave partners all that time to do their own thing – to improvise.
So I like to see people do ‘their’ thing in those moments. And I think we can analyse those moments to see what sort of person they are, their dance experience and knowledge, their physical abilities, even their political or social beliefs and position (take a look at girl x’s swingout compared to guy x’s swingout – what does this tell you about gender relations? about sexuality? about musicality?). It’s there that we make the dance mean something.
more specific rambling
I wonder how we might combine ‘making the dance relevant to us today’ with any sense of historical ‘accuracy’ or congruency? ie getting new stuff in without losing the old stuff?
It wasn’t a problem in Afro-American dance communities in the ‘original swing era’ (or in vernacular dance traditions generally) – the shared knowledge and skill base was just added to. Useful stuff stuck. Other stuff was shelved.
But many of us feel – as swing dance revivalists – that there’s a responsibility to take a historical moment (be it 1935 in Harlem, 1930 in Kansas city, 1942 in Los Angeles or that heady summer on Balboa Island) and preserve it. Because it’s beautiful or fascinating or exciting or wonderful or awful or scary or whatever. We just want to get onto that moment and somehow make it stick.
It’s an interesting tension, I think.
Some ways I’ve noticed contemporary dancers make swing dances reflect their contemporary lives by exploiting the inherent flexibility of a dance that incorporates things like improvisation, impersonation and imitation:
– women leading and woman/woman dance partnerships not a new thing for partner dance by any means.
Same sex dance partnerships were there waaay back in Europe when partner dancing got going, it was there in various African nations pre American slavery (particularly when mixed-sex partner dancing was taboo), it was there in Afro-American vernacular dance from the beginning, right through the 30s to now.
For me, it’s about reconciling my passion for dance with my frustration with patriarchal and hetero-normative gender roles and dynamics. It’s also about getting to dance with my female friends.
– dancing lindyhop and other swing dances to contemporary music. I know, it makes me cringe sometimes, but hell, if it gets people dancing… I just ask that you dance to olden days music as well: don’t replace the old stuff with the new. Hang onto the bits that are useful. And I think swinging jazz is useful.
– incorporating ‘new skool’ moves into oldskool dances:
the body roll (sexy new skool… or is it really oldskool made newskool already?);
running man (humorous performance of 1980s/70s oldskool… which might also be really oldskool made new and then made new again);
various hip hop bits and pieces (as in hip hop lindy)… again, isn’t this oldskool made newskool in the 80s?
– women and men ‘dancing like themselves’. So seeing men and women actually taking the structure of swing dances to perform their own personality and identity, outside a static gender role or identity. So, seeing a young heterosexual woman dancing with ‘power’ or kickarse to show that she’s an independent woman, in a way she mightn’t have been able to in the 1930s or 40s. Especially if her family or ethnic group weren’t into female empowerment in that time. Or seeing an assertive, alpha-type chick take a moment to just ‘follow’ and stop making decisions for a while. Or seeing a young man not worrying that he may look ‘gay’ or whatever for relaxing and really feeling the music in ways that mightn’t go down so well at a conventional night club. Or seeing a young gay guy working with female partners in a close embrace and not having to second guess the sexual tensions that would accompany this contact in a non-dance setting. Or perhaps even more exciting, see things like that first young woman [I]perform[/I] a meek, stereotypical ‘good Asian girl’ and then rework it to totally subvert it.
– one of the things I’m most interested in at the moment: swing dancers getting into solo stuff. Especially if they’ve never done any type of dancing – not even disco dancing – before swing. I am really interested in the ring structure for things like big apples, charleston-offs, a bit of jazzedy jiggywiggy or whatever – people dancing in a circle so they can see each other, and all be a part of the deal, and yet experimenting with moves and the music independently. I think this is a nice way for people to use a really, really, really old dance form to experiment with their own bodies and personalities in a public place, trying on all sorts of moves. I especially like it when it’s all girl or all boy – I like to see some same sex peer work. But then I also dig a mixed gender thing too…
in this setting you see people for whom dance has never been part of their everyday lives before taking a bit of a chance that they might embarrass themselves and really exploring the things they’re physically capable of, the limits of their ‘jazz’ vocabulary, their ability to steal steps from people near by or make up new steps. It’s different to the big apple dances of the olden days, but it’s still using similar themes and structures.
Neat!
mince pies
Dave demonstrates his mastery of pastry once again. I’d add a photo of the pies I made for Christmas day, but they’re all gone, and his were so much better it’d shame me to show mine.
Long live the home-made mince pie, with home-made fruit mince and home-made pastry… oh, and home-made stars.