Category Archives: lindy hop and other dances

Someone told me…

…Skye read(s) my blog and I felt like this
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only with more squeeing in my pants*.

(image c/o carrionlaughing)

On a completely different tack, but still here in this post because yolo, bro, yolo…I play quite a lot of Big Joe Turner and Count Basie when I’m DJing. That’s like saying “I do a lot of Frankie moves when I lindy hop”, as though there was any other way of doing it. But there’s something about Turner shouting his guts out over some stamping fucking piano. That shit gets me hot. Hot in the ‘dances like a fool til she dehydrates’ way. The only way that really means anything, right?

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‘Boss of the Blues’ is not a pretentious album. It’s not particularly sophisticated. It’s not rare, it’s not unusual. It’s not delicate, not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s loud, it’s shouty. Sometimes Turner shouts so loudly into the microphone the sound distorts. And while he’s shouting that loudly, the brass section is blowing their guts out and it’s just all noise. The sort of noise that gets into your guts and makes you feel extremely strong, inarticulate feelings. This is party music. Loud, shouting party music. And slow, night time party music where you’re pretty sure you’re gonna get a really good fuck by the end of it. **

This is the sort of album that beckons in rock n roll with a stamping, shouting jump blues rhythm. It’s not some shitty modern day neo band. It’s a bunch of dirty old musicians playing dirty old music in a way that lets us know that things are changing, and yet still exactly the same.

This is not the sort of album that will impress your old scratchy DJ nerd friends, or score you any snobby pants old school dancer points. But it’s an album every lindy hopper, every blues dancer, every swing DJ, every blues DJ should have.

If I’m playing a song from ‘Boss Of The Blues’ (which I do most sets), set up by a bit of new testament Basie, I like to follow up with something from the The Spoon Concerts:
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Why yes, I do like a dirty old man shouting about big legged women and money and being hard done by.

And if I still haven’t gotten it out of my system, I add something from this:

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Because ‘Breakfast Dance and Barbecue’ was one of (if not the) first album I bought specifically for DJing for dancers. It’s all live, it’s all recorded late at night, everyone is trashed, but everyone is truly great.

I feel that the 1950s were a truly great era for good, solid lindy hopping music. The technology had finally gotten good, musicians weren’t being lynched in the street, bop and rock and roll were pushing jazz about in the playground, forcing it to get its shit together. People like Big Joe Turner, Jimmy Witherspoon, Count Basie pushed back.

*If there’s one thing I’ve never pretended to be, it’s cool, calm and sophisticated.
**Listen to that version of ‘Cherry Red’ and tell me you don’t agree.

[edit: soundtrack for this post here]

Who is Marshall Stearns?

I’m writing some notes for our students on FB, so I figured I’d let the content free, here in the unfenced part of the internet.

Who?

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Marshall Stearns.
Stearns was a jazz music and dance historian and reseacher, who was involved in the founding of the Institute of Jazz Studies.

Most modern day lindy hoppers and jazz dancers would know him for his book Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance, which he co-authored (and researched) with his wife Jean Stearns.

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Jazz Dance is an invaluable resource if you’re interested in the history of jazz dances (including lindy hop), and it includes extensive interviews, biographies and descriptions of dances. There’s even a section of labanotation in the back, where each dance is carefully described in detail.

But even more importantly, Marshall Stearns features in some of the most useful archival film footage of jazz dance that we have available to us today.

You can see him calling the steps for Al Minns and Leon James in this television program:

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Marshall Stearns worked with Al and Leon and other African and African American dancers and musicians, recording their stories, dance steps and knowledge of dance and music.

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(Poor John Lee Hooker, workin’ for the man.)

Marshall and his wife Jean, who was also his research partner and co-author, spent hours and hours and days and days working with musicians and dancers, compiling the book Jazz Dance, but also expanding their collection of music, film and documents, which eventually became the Institute of Jazz Studies Archive. They describe this process in Jazz Dance.

Then Marshall (who was a university lecturer and researcher) and Jean set about sharing this knowledge with other people.

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They published books and papers, appeared on television, and were involved in projects like The Music Inn, where (mostly white, mostly rich) people could come to learn about jazz music and dance.
The Stearns write in Jazz Dance:

In the early 1950’s, during the first years of a summer resort in the Berkshire Mountains called Music Inn, we tried an experiment. Our aim was to entertain – quite informally – a handful of guests in the lounge after dinner, but our host Philip Barber was carried away with his theory of instantaneous talent combustion. “Throw gifted performers together,” he said, “get one of them going, and watch them all discover talents which they didn’t know they had.” With various jazzmen of supposedly separate eras, the idea had worked well.
That evening we had dancers from three different countries: Asadata Dafora from the Sierra Leone, West Africa; Geoffrey Holder from Trinidad, West Indies; and Al Minns and Leon James from the Savoy Ballroom, New York City. All of them were alert to their own traditions and articulate, eager to demonstrate their own styles.
So we began with the Minns-James repertory of twenty or so Afro-American dances, from “Cakewalk to Cool,” asking Dafora and Holder to comment freely. The results were astonishing. One dancer hardly began a step before another exclaimed with delight, jumped to his feet, and executed a related version of his own. The audience found itself sharing the surprise and pleasure of the dancers as they hit upon similarities in their respective traditions. We were soon participating in the shock of recognizing what appeared to be be one great tradition (Jazz Dance p12).

The Institute of Jazz Studies holds a collection of recordings of oral histories as well as countless books, papers, music scores and ephemera. You can access some of this online. A highlight is this great biography of Mary Lou Williams, composer, arranger and pianist in Andy Kirk’s band, whose music we often use in class. And you can listen to Nellie Lutcher talking about playing music and traveling on the road in the 1930s and 40s.

Al and Leon continued to dance, perform and discuss jazz dance with Stearns for years after the heyday of the Savoy. Al Minns later worked with the first of the lindy hop revivalists in the 1980s, including Lennart Westerlund.

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My favourite part is just after that first quote:

Dafora finally observed with some asperity that although the Fish Tail came from Africa, dancing in the European fashion with one arm around your partner’s waist was considered obscene. (“The African dance,” writes President Senghor of Senegal, “disdains bodily contact.”)

Solo because yolo, right?

While the Stearns rocked the kasbah, I can’t help but wonder how those nights at the Music Inn might have gone if there’d been at least one woman dancing, to talk about African women’s dances, and to demonstrate the badassery that is a woman dancing…

[edit: I’ve just come across this story about jazz education which mentions the Lenox School, which seems an extension of the Music Inn]

Little Big Weekend 3

This is where my attention is right now:

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The (3rd) Little Big Weekend, featuring Lennart Westerlund and Georgia Brooks, 11-12 May 2013, here in Sydney.

The website: www.littlebigweekend.com/ is now active;

There’s a twitter account to follow: @littlebigwkend;

And a facebook event.

I run two Little Big Weekends per year, and I think they’re great. They’re basically smaller workshop-focussed weekends, tailored specifically to my local dance scene. But we do attract interstaters as well, which is nice.

There’s only one day of general admission workshops, and the workshops start at midday. There’s only one day of classes, because local peeps don’t want to spend their entire weekend at workshops – they’re usually busy people with full time jobs who have other things they need to do on the weekend. But the workshop content is quite unique (we don’t just do random ‘intro to charleston’ or ‘lindy hop blahblah’ – we do 1920s eccentric solo dance, or ‘blues dancing that’s dynamic and interesting’). I hunt down teachers who have mad teaching skills and are also great dancers and (most importantly) are approachable, friendly, nice people. Because life is too short to deal with pain in the arse, drama queen teachers. I’m also very interested in mixed-level classes, especially solo dance classes, because they’re good for the local community.

There’s only one big dance and one major late night party, because local dancers are busy and can’t really trash themselves hardcore all that regularly. The major dance is in a big town hall, and will feature a really great band. The late night party is the best late night party. The band is truly fabulous, there’s free cake (and not just random cake – really good, high quality, fancy cake), there’re usually two rooms of music and a chill out room, and it’s a community-run, non-profit event. This time the weekend happens to fall on the same weekend as a fortnightly DJed dance, so that’s on the Friday as well. And this time, because we are hosting Lennart Westerlund, I’ve added a film-talk-Q&A event to the program. That’s on the Sunday, and it’ll be a bit more chillaxed. The venue does good food and drink, there’s non-dancing stuff to do there (lawn bowls, etc), and it’s a friendly, community-run venue (NOT a Clubs Australia venue). The film/Q&A will be followed by DJed social dancing.

And, finally, there’s another teachers’ workshop on the Sunday. This is an afternoon session with limited numbers, restricted to people who are currently teaching regularly. These workshops have two parts: a general skills tidy-up for teachers (looking specifically at dance skills for teachers); and a teaching-skills and practical tips session. Because Lennart tells me he teaches ‘old school Harlem style’, I want him to talk about this in that session, and to explain how this is different to other types of teaching. And I want him to explain how he fits history into his classes, in a practical way.
I find these teachers’ workshops really interesting and stimulating. The small class size is just fantastic, and working and talking with other teachers is so inspiring and stimulating. These aren’t ‘be a better teacher’ sessions, so much as ‘come and think about and work on teaching practices with us’ sessions. The sessions emphasise participants’ asking questions and bringing challenges or things to work on, where they can workshop them with other teachers and draw on the experience of the visiting teacher. And then the best bit is that we then get to go to the Film/Q&A gig and talk about these ideas.

Having run larger events which explicitly target inter-staters – a national and international audience – running locally-focussed gigs is really nice. I don’t need to do aggressive interstate promotions, hassling people in other cities and competing with other high profile events. I can aim for a smaller group of people, which makes for much better learning experiences (good student:teacher ratios = good learning), and I can canvass local people to find out what they want to learn, and then plan the weekend to suit their interests. Financially speaking, the risk is much lower, but the profit percentage stays the same, which is nice. Running two per year means there are two opportunities to earn profit, but there’s less risk of a massive loss. Because I’m not trying to make a weekend event feel like good value for money for a traveler, I don’t have to run my local volunteers ragged putting on three million events in one weekend. I can just run a couple of good parties. And it also means that I can look at really unusual or interesting class content. I don’t have to try to appeal to a huge, general audience. I can be very specific.

The littler program means that I can run two of these per year. It’s not as draining a a mega event, where you run on too little sleep and too much work for too long. Running two per year means that promotion works in a slightly different way as well. The event stays closer to the front of punters’ minds, and if they miss one, they know the next one is just six (or so) months away, so it’s not a huge drama to plan for that.

So, all up, it’s a good thing. And I enjoy working on these events quite a lot. They don’t leave me with that burnt-out, exhausted and creatively wrung-dry feeling that a huge event does. And because I’m deliberately thinking small, there’s not the pressure to be a huge success. Having said that, because I have had experience with larger events, I can draw on that to make these smaller ones very high quality. They’re not dodgy small and amateurish events. The local managers and volunteers are highly skilled people – they are capable, professional and a joy to work with. And Sydney is a big, cosmopolitan city, so we have very good resources to draw on – good venues, great bands, lots of options for sound and lighting engineers, great restaurants and bars. As a fairly diverse, long-running lindy hop community (the oldest in the country) with lots of dancers who travel overseas, we also have a fairly discerning audience-base, so we need to run events that are fairly decent. So you’re not getting rubbishy DJs in crappy dance studios. You’re getting fucking hot bands in great dance studios :D

…and that’s partly why I haven’t been writing here much lately. The part of my brain that does critical thinking about dance is otherwise engaged.

FYI If you’re interested in the Little Big Weekend, we are running a fourth event in December this year. I have no idea who’ll be teaching, but we have a very good band lined up to do a series of gigs, so the parties will be good :D
It’s 7th-8th December, the weekend after MLX, which is 28 Nov-1 Dec. So if you’re thinking of a trip to Australia, it’s cool to combine the two events. MLX is the biggest event in the country, and Melbourne is a great tourist city. Then the LBW the weekend after is in Sydney, which is the biggest city in the country. Last December we had quite a few internationals travel up from MLX to the LBW.

with your eyes closed, not worrying about what you look like

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Things haven’t been so great round here, so I haven’t been able to do any Women’s History Month updates. Here’s a comic by one of my favourite illustrators, Ann Emond, because it reminds me that the best dancing in all the world is the dancing you do with your eyes closed, wearing your favourite clothes and not worrying about what you look like. So, pretty much the opposite of 90% of lindy hop.

Women’s History Month 2012: Aïcha Goblet

I know nothing about this woman.

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This is a photo of her from 1922 by Man Ray.

I found her name in Michel Fabre’s article ‘Rediscovering Aïcha, Lucy and D’al-Al, Colored French Stage Artists’
He writes

A circus artist, then a popular model, then a self-trained, occasional music hall dancer and actress, Aïcha Goblet had already taken many of the career steps that Baker would herself later attempt, and evoked a very similar response from many critics. As Salmon remarked, in language that more than obliquely references Baker, “the voluptuous beauties at the Colonial Exhibition could not vie with those in Montparnasse … The Miss Africa of Montparnasse is Aïcha.” Nevertheless, Aïcha did not become nearly as celebrated as Baker and had to content herself with making a modest living and enjoying all the while an impeccable reputation.

And Fabre quotes writer and art critic André Salmon:

If Aïcha is often naked, she rarely undoes her head kerchief—now cabbage-green, now the color of silver—which suits her so well. Aïcha is too much a girl from Roubaix not to be perfectly civilized. She sits, she dances, she is pleasant. Long before Josephine Baker launched the fashion of banana belts, Aïcha wore, at wild parties in Montparnasse, her diminutive raffia skirt.

I can’t find any footage of her dancing.

Women’s History Month 2013: Dawn Hampton!

Ryan Swift’s Photo of Dawn Hampton at LindyFest 2011 decided me on Dawn Hampton for today’s Woman Jazz Dancer.

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Hampton played a bundle of instruments in her family’s band and has had a long career in music and dance. But she’s best known today for her musicality classes, and there are a couple of clips of her scaring teaching dancers about musicality at Lindyfest this year. I really like these clips because she does the sort of nuanced dancing that reminds me of dancers like Leon James – stillness and minimalism combined with sharp, dramatic movements.

A demonstration dance with Virgine Jensen, Steven Mitchell and Frida Segerdahl:

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Teaching a musicality class:

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Women’s History Month 2013: Sandra Gibson!

aka Mildred “Boogie” Pollard, aka Lindy hopper!

In Radio City Revels in 1938, the second couple in the jam, but the first couple after the cut from the singer at the beginning (ie there’s another couple in the jam before Gibson and partner ‘Shorty’ Davis).

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In Spirit Moves in 1950 with James Berry:

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Women’s History Month 2013: Pearl Primus!

I know very little about Pearl Primus, but I’ve been fascinated by this photo since I found it on the Google Life photo collection:

(“Pearl Primus performing to “Honeysuckle Rose” played by Teddy Wilson at piano, Lou McGarity on trombone, Bobby Hackett on trumpet, Sidney Catlett on drums & John Simons on bass during jam session at Gjon Mili’s studio” – Gjon Mili – New York – 1943)

She’s not a ‘jazz dancer’ in the strictest sense – she probably fits a little more comfortably into the concert dance or even ballet basket. But she was very much an activist, with a passion for African and African American dance, and she was definitely active as a dancer, performer and choreographer during the 1930s and 40s.

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(photo from The Victoria and Albert Museum’s ‘History of Black Dance: 20th-Century Black American Dance’ page)

I did a bit of googling and came up with very few actual videos of her dancing on youtube, but I did find this little doco about her that only fuelled my interest:


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Then I found this video of her dancing, which isn’t too great – you can’t really see what she’s doing, and I’m not sure it really does her work justice.

NB that first photo is from a series called ‘Jam Session’ by Gjon Mili in the Life Magazine collection on google, which features many other amazing pics.

Gjon Mili is interesting because he directed here, featuring Marie Bryant) AND, the great ‘Blues for Greasy’ jam session film which starred:
Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison: trumpet
Lester Young: Tenor Sax
Flip Phillips: Tenor Sax
Bill Harris: Trombone
Hank Jones: Piano
Ray Brown: Bass
Buddy Rich: Drums
Ella Fitzgerald: Vocals

Mili worked with Norman Granz on this film, and Granz owned the Verve record label as well as organising the Jazz At The Philarmonic concerts and being hardcore anti-segregation.