SwingDJs

For anybody interested in performing, this is the information from this year's past festival. It was released in February, so I doubt the updated info will be released soon. The address should remain the same, although the deadline and other dates would move correspondingly. My current campaign is f...

But you do raise a good question. Would Strayhorn have achieved without the considerable support of the Ellington organization but with more freedom? No, not even a little bit. Not even that, because everybody needs a start. Take Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mercer. They were able to break away from Tom...

"Held it back"? Held it back from what? No one in the public ever had a clue that Strayhorn was gay. Most people still don't even know who he is, much less his sexual orientation. ... "A" Train was and is a huge hit - one of the biggest big band hits of the era. A Train was a gr...

"Take the A train" and "Sing, Sing, Sing": two valid points. S3 was more overdone than ITM-- very, very long dance snob lindy circle is all I have to say. The song's redemption is that the soloists are allowed more freedom than Glenn Miller's tight arrangements. I've heard of cov...

The ITM Wiki entry is exceptionally poor. That's what's great. You can change it, or if you give me the citations, I can. Wikipedia gets some knocks because it's only as good as the effort put into it, and as an online resource for plagarism, it doesn't get any easier, but I'm convinced that outsid...

I've heard a lot about what you want from a band but not why its so important to have a dance band with name recognition at this event. Without thst, its hard to give useful advice. It's not so much name recognition as groove recognition. Any jazz act can send an audition tape. At this point, I'm c...

The band(s) may be one piece but what you described a couple of posts back sounds like something really spontaneous. That's the crazy thing. These spontaneous things have been happening every time I'm there. This year, I did East Coast with a 18 ft tall puppet. Before that, we made an improv lighte...

I figured unless there's another Django Reinhardt waiting to reemerge that the buzz of one performer or band is not going to be the draw. With 260 national artists, 160 local artists and 260 student musicians in this past year's lineup, there is no lack of programming. I do feel, however, that is im...

Does some of the disdain for "In The Mood" come from the fact that the original arrangement has been lost........ Original arrangement lost? :?: This has been on the Wikipedia article since the end of January, too long not to have been removed for being vandalism. It is uncited, however. ...

Does some of the disdain for "In The Mood" come from the fact that the original arrangement has been lost, so the Glenn Miller version overly defines what the song is? Sure you can make a remixed medley with it, cover it, but Setzer's just coppin' Miller when he does it. At this point, I'm...

I think it would help if you really defined what you wanted from the artist, what you want from the event, what would the goals be for putting out a floor. Right now I can't really understand what your intent is. To various degrees, you can pretty much dance to anything playing on the six stages, a...

BTW, how did the LP/MF version of "The Tennessee Waltz" differ fro Patti Paige?

All I knew before the show was that he designed famous guitars, including Paul McCartney's. Learning not only that almost every aspect of amplification and recording was pioneered by him in some way, but that he himself was an extremely accomplished musician, the bridge between Django Reinhardt and ...

Why do you still want to bother with that stillborn Neo crap? It's nothing to do with Neo-Swing, the only condition is that the band is has a possibility of appearing, so that rules out fantasy stuff like a Rat Pack reunion with Glenn Miller leading the orchestra. If you know an act that tells it l...

venues. Dancers are notoriously bad tippers and bad customers for bartenders, and if the venue owner sees dancers tipping the DJ and not his/her own employees, that will come off poorly. We're better on the tipping, but notorious about not drinking, even sneaking in bottled water. What's probably n...