I’m currently preparing for a set at the upcoming Melbourne Lindy Exchange, and figured I might annotate the process.
[Rereading, this has turned out to be a really boring post. I’ll post with interesting band names and song ideas later. Hopefully that’ll be more interesting.]
MLX is currently the largest event in Australian lindy hop, except perhaps for Camp Oz in Adelaide, which is a week of workshops. MLX is an all-social event. By ‘big’ I mean that it attracts more registrations from dancers than other events. Its program is also ‘big’, but there are bigger. Before 2005 it was a workshop weekend with some social bits. It was the first Australian camp or exchange. In 2005 it changed completely, coordinated by the non-profit Melbourne Jazz Dance Association. I was part of that group. We ran it as a social weekend partly because we didn’t have enough time or money to book international teachers, but mostly because we wanted to run the sort of event that we would really like to go to: good floors, good bands, good DJs, all at as low a price as possible. Everything else was secondary. That last point about money is important as the previous year MLX had cost $500 for a full pass (which did cover 8 days rather than 4). We were, basically, a bunch of hippies. Five years later, MLX is far bigger than it has ever been before, attracting dancers from all over the country and world. It is the premier social dancing event in the country.
It’s also the one event in the calendar where I feel I can really DJ to my limits. I feel as though the dancers are most willing to experiment with new songs, have the highest level of fitness and a real passion for exploring new music. I have to note, though, that I haven’t been to Hullabaloo in Perth for a while, and I remember that as a similarly quality weekend, but with workshops. The all-social program means that dancers will stay up all night, to the very end.
So, anyway, whatever, where am I going with this?
The point is that in 2006 we ran two rooms on the Thursday welcome night dance. Which was a first time thing. Downstairs was straight ahead lindy hop, upstairs was Gangbusters. This is what we wrote about it on the website:
Gangbusters
The Cats and Fiddle vocal group recorded Gangbusters in 1939, a song whose chorus – “bang bang bang!” – echoes the feel of this high-energy Hot Side. The MLX6 Gangbusters features superfast tracks for speedfreaks, balboan and lindy hopper alike.
The MLX6 Gangbusters features DJ Trev Hutchison (Perth).
It was immensely successful, which is in no small part due to the word of mouth promotion and general building of excitement carried out by dancers before the weekend. There was much mutual challenging and commitment to dance every song. Trev did a really, really good job.
This was in a year when Melbourne had only recently made a sort of transition from extremely slow music to something a little quicker. There was still quite a bit of resistance to older music from the 20s, 30s and 40s from most dancers. So we were taking a punt. But it came off. We could have run it again the next year, but I can’t remember.
So now, four years later, I’m not involved in running MLX and haven’t been since we moved to Sydney in 2008. And I’m DJing a set in the Gangbusters bracket!
This year MLX is also hosting the Hellzapoppin’ contest, which is really just a very fast lindy hop contest where dancers battle in a phrase by phrase format. I think it’s the most interesting competition in the country. The phrase battle format makes it interesting, the tempos make it exciting and the lack of fluffy rules makes it feel a bit real. There’s also a strong audience enthusiasm component – the audience’s response contributes to the competitors’ score.
What this means is that the competition will have people’s interest in fast music up. Hopefully it’ll also mean that there’ll be dancers there with better fitness and better dance skills who can hack those tempos. But I am actually following the comp night (admittedly with a two hour gap) at the late night, DJing first at the late night. I’m quite ok with a first set – I like setting up the room and I prefer to DJ first if I’m planning a big night of dancing. And I am.
Here’s how I’m approaching the set:
- Warm the room from nothing to a set where the tempos don’t go below 180bpm. This is tricky if the room is empty. I’m probably going to start lower (no lower than 140, probably at about 160) and when I reach critical mass, I’m going to chunk it up. But it’s going to be something I do very carefully. In fact, it’s a bad idea to plan how I’ll handle this part of the night – you really have to pay attention to the people in the room, figure out how they’re feeling, and then respond to that. In this setting, as the first DJ, I tend to avoid coming in with a wall of massive energy sound because it just feels too aggressive. But if I start too chilled, I’ll never get up where I need to be. So I’m thinking higher tempos with a mellower sound or energy. Light, fun, but not too massive.
- Set up the room for the next DJ. This means that I need to get the room ‘warm’ before the next DJ starts. She’s expecting hot, fast tempos, so she’ll be a bit shitty if I’m grooving along at 120bpm when she arrives. It also means that I can’t totally kill the dancers before she gets there – I have to work the energy so they have little emotional and physical breaks. And yet still keep the energy, enthusiasm and excitement up. I predict the Gangbusters will peak about midway through the second DJ’s set, if she keeps the energy building. I think it’ll stay hot for an hour, and then mellow a bit by the middle of the last DJ’s set. Over all, that’s about four or five hours of very fast music. If you assume most people jog at about 150bpm, then a tempo range of 180-350 is kind of serious. Other things will affect the session though – the aircon (or lack of), availability of water, what’s happening in the other room at the same time, the social make up of the room and so on. When I’m warming a room, I often like to check with the following DJ where they’d like to start, so I can kind of move things that way.
- Keep it old school – in style at least. I’m going to aim for recordings from the 1920s-1950s, but I have a few modern bands I like who do some seriously hot stuff. So I’ll just see how things go. The newer stuff might be a good starting point.
- Favour the big bands and classic swing. There’s a lot of smaller New Orleans band action getting about at the moment, and while I do like that stuff, I think that the big, solidly swinging powerhouses of the 30s and 40s are where it’s at for massive energy lindy hop. I’m going to try to play like the Savoy in the 30s. I’m into bigger bands from the 30s for my own dancing at the moment because they’re BIG and that means they have to have some serious arrangements – the band has to be organised. And organised well. And that means they’ll actually be putting down some pretty bad arse songs. I also l like the depth of sound and rhythm and melody in a big band – there’s lots there for me to work with. I’m into a few smaller bands as well, but I’m going to avoid vocal groups like Slim and Slam and the Cats and the Fiddle, because I want to build sound and energy, and those guys often drop the energy. However, there are a few of these types of songs which are very chic with dancers at the moment, so I’m going to use those judiciously. Which leads me to…
- I’m going to work the wave. Which means that I’m going to work up and down the tempos, from 180-350. It also means I’m going to work up and down the emotional scale – from massive, full on excitement to more relaxed, lighter feelings. Just because the room is ‘fast’ doesn’t mean it has to be dull. I find that sitting on one tempo is boring, no matter what the speed. And using just one mood or energy level can be equally dull. In a room like this I will need to be sure I keep the energy up, though, so I won’t sit on the mellow stuff much. I’ll use it to offer dancers an emotional break. I think of this as starting at a base, calm level, then working dancers up to a climax, then backing off (but not back to where we started), then building them up, then backing off, then building up. The trick is figuring out where the final climax is, and just how much people have left in them after that. There’s nothing as horrible as a DJ who just keeps pounding away.*
Well, that’s my list of ‘rules’. The first rule of DJing, of course, is there are no rules. And as soon as you play to an agenda or try to work a plan, you fail to work the room, you fail to connect with the dancers, and you fuck up. Badly.
So my real preparation for this set involves my listening to all my fast music (which is quite a big task), weeding out anything that’s not totally top shelf. I’m looking at a range of tempos and styles and energy levels, so I have a little of everything on hand. And I’ll be able to respond to whatever I see.
*Which reminds me. At both exchanges lately I’ve seen DJs with their heads down in their laptops, headphones on, the volume up really high in the room, playing some loud song, and the floor empty because people have literally gone home. Meanwhile the poor volunteers who have to clean up and close up after the gig are exhausted and/or asleep in a huddle. This is not a cool thing. My rule for the last set of the night: there has to be 2 or more couples on the floor at all times. If I get 2 songs in a row with less, I end the set.