SwingDJs

I think the best tunes for blues dancing are slow swinging blues and jazz songs that have a sexy or bluesy "feel", with tempos ranging from about 70 BPM to 130 BPM. Songs with breaks or interesting patterns are best, as are songs with lots of expression or passion. Since blues dancing is ...

Gene Krupa started out in Chicago. I think.

It's too bad we can't all get together at some point and just share music with each other, like a DJ/music appreciation festival of some sort.

I guess we could do it digitally but it's not the same.

When I went to Seattle in '02 it was the widest variety of music I have ever heard at a lindy hop event, bar none.

That reminds me. Reuben, you said you were going to sell me a Charlie Parker CD, months ago. Do you remember that?

At least, I think it was Charlie Parker.

Someone, somewhere, wrote and performed the music that Justin Timberlake sings and sells a lot of. I've never written off pop just because it was shlocky; some of the most memorable melodies ever written are from songs that are lame as hell, emotionwise. Something doesn't have to be good to be catch...

But your definition, Lawrence, is still "so overbroad as to be useless". Just being bass-heavy jazz doesn't signal "groove" to me. Basie Live at the Sands (Before Frank) playing Flight of the Foo Birds or Woodside isn't "groove" to me. Recapitulate your definition, exac...

Oh, another good starting point for going from swing to bop is West Coast Jazz, with Stan Getz, Shelley Manne, Conte Candoli, and a bunch of other dudes. The whole "cool jazz" phenomenon was really just bop without the fire and heat. The album contains a couple of very hummable standards (...

I have to admit I'm disappointed to see lots of New Testament Basie songs and very few of the Old Testament flagwavers on your example list, too. That's part of what I meant about turning the band into a DJ. Those charts and that style of loping New Testament Basie sound seems to be exactly what we ...

Bop does have melodies, but they're not the standard diatonic major/minor melodies people are accustomed to. I actually caught myself humming "Confirmation" (badly) recently. It's actually kind of catchy, and not that different from melodies like "Bernie's Tune" or "Cottonta...

I have to admit, it does puzzle me that you'd need to indicate mood and feel to "real jazz musicians" for songs like "Splanky" and "Easy Does It", especially if the charts are already laid out. I mean, those songs are warhorses. It's like saying "OK, Metallica, on ...

For any purely music-theory criteria that you apply to a song to see if it is blues, there is a blues song that does not conform to that criteria. You CANNOT lay out, in exact terms, what a blues song is. You can say it shuffles or swings, and follows a 12 bar format, and has an AAB lyric structure,...

Heh, he played Prelude and Satin Doll at the Bowl too.

I wonder if his set list is identical between gigs?

Yeah but Lawrence is projecting thoughts and feelings onto the points Mike is raising, which is one SURE FIRE WAY to start an argument.

Stop projecting. Read the words and take them as written. Imagine every possible tone, not just the first one that leaps to mind.

THEN respond.

I seem to recall Murray is famed for making controversial assertions about jazz, but I don't quite remember the context. At any rate, like all attempts to classify music, there are gray zones. Third stream jazz a la John Lewis and MJQ isn't solidly rooted in the blues, but is arguably still jazz. Fu...