So this is really Kevin T's story and those of you who browse Seattle Delphi have already read this - but he posted his play list from Sunday - he played "G is for Groove" by Duke Ellington.
That just cracked me up - I really wish I had been there to listen to it -- I don't think it sounded like Gene Harris though....
Regarding "classic" and "groove" style s
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SirScratchAlot
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You don;t get to make up your own Label....heheheShanabanana wrote:
Though I'll never submit to being put in a useless "groove vs. vintage" box or whatever the hell they're fighting about ...
The team in the Middle that plays everything (or try's to) is called the all mighty wedding DJ....hated by all sides...LOLShanabanana wrote: Most DJs have an extensive collection of one style of music because that's what resonates with them. Some have broader tastes than others. This isn't an us vs. them debate where there are only two teams.
\\\"Jazz Musicians have dance in them, and Jazz dancers have music in them, or Jazz doesn''''t happen.\\\" Sidney Bechet
Why should we hate wedding DJs? They play to a totally different audience. Heck, their audience changes widely depending on the gig. They have to deal with issues we never have to deal with (the wedding couple, diverse families, etc..). I don't hate them. I don't want to be one, but they are about as relevant to our discussions as radio DJs or hip hop DJs (or you can insert any other type of DJ).SirScratchAlot wrote: The team in the Middle that plays everything (or try's to) is called the all mighty wedding DJ....hated by all sides...LOL
Why is it such a prerequisite to hate so many people/artists/songs/groups? I know some of you guys are proud that this is such a sword wielding site. I just wish everybody were a lot more diplomatic.
because their swing song is sing, sing, sing.
because their pop song is YMCA
because their get-everyone-up-and-dance song is the electric slide
talk about lowest common denominator.
i don't like wedding dj's. i don't envy their job. I couldn't live with the guilt of being paid so much to play such harrible music.
because their pop song is YMCA
because their get-everyone-up-and-dance song is the electric slide
talk about lowest common denominator.
i don't like wedding dj's. i don't envy their job. I couldn't live with the guilt of being paid so much to play such harrible music.
Mike Marcotte
I am not saying that everybody has to like wedding DJs. But, there are plenty of weddings out there that want/need YMCA and its ilk played; plenty of weddings are completly content to have "In the Mood" or "Jump, Jive, and Wail" be there token swing songs. Unless it was swing dancer wedding, I would not expect much in terms of "good" swing music. Wedding DJs have their job description and their mandate, rarely is it playing music that you can lindy hop to. Most of the DJs on the Board could be great wedding DJ, most just don't want to be. I don't want to be one. But, if and when a friend asks me to DJ their wedding, my attitude will be to give the crowd what they want, whatever that ends up being.mark0tz wrote:because their swing song is sing, sing, sing.
because their pop song is YMCA
because their get-everyone-up-and-dance song is the electric slide
talk about lowest common denominator.
i don't like wedding dj's. i don't envy their job. I couldn't live with the guilt of being paid so much to play such harrible music.
As for feeling guilty. I can imagine keeping it separate. A few weeks back, I spun for a whip club gig. A lot of the music was not my to my liking, but I was getting paid to do a job, and I think I kept the crowd happy. Playing for a wedding of non-dancers is not much different. It should have no impact whatsoever on the choices you make playing for swing dancers.
Nathan
HAHA! At my cousin's wedding recently, the DJ played both "In the Mood" and "Jump, Jive, and Wail" as swing songs. It's gotten to the point now where people expect my wife and I to dance at weddings and stuff, so I do. I may hate the songs, but people just want to see us dance, and I figure it's good exposure, so who cares. What am I going to do, refuse to dance and come across as some sort of musical snob?Nate Dogg wrote:I am not saying that everybody has to like wedding DJs. But, there are plenty of weddings out there that want/need YMCA and its ilk played; plenty of weddings are completly content to have "In the Mood" or "Jump, Jive, and Wail" be there token swing songs. Unless it was swing dancer wedding, I would not expect much in terms of "good" swing music. Wedding DJs have their job description and their mandate, rarely is it playing music that you can lindy hop to.
Interestingly, the DJ didn't JUST play those two songs. He played a 4 or 5 song set including Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, and this song that was pretty cool that I almost couldn't survive because it was so fast. It ended up being pretty fun, actually.
The down side was that playing 5 swing songs in a row isn't the best way to keep a crowd on the dance floor.
-Jeremy
It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.
It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.
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Shanabanana
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Hated by all sides...except the dancers.The team in the Middle that plays everything (or try's to) is called the all mighty wedding DJ....hated by all sides...LOL
Perhaps the people you play for are uncomfortable with variety (though I really doubt that). By and large, I've found that dancers don't want to hear the same thing all night, no matter what style it is.
It's rare for me to hear a DJ that is a purist in any genre. They may have a flavor that they lean toward, but good DJs sample from what's out there...or the dancers start to grumble. So perhaps the two "sides" are "variety" vs. "one-note-samba" and in that case, I'm definitely on the variety side. But besides that, I don't think this discussion is really very pertinent.
Except for those who love the fake security of the "us vs. them" elitism. They'll always find something to take sides over.
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lindyholic
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Yeah, whenever I go to weddings now, everyone expects me to dance when they put on the swing music. And the worse part is, though, that there are no follows there. My aunts bug me to dance with them, and they're not half bad for people who almost never swing dance.yedancer wrote:HAHA! At my cousin's wedding recently, the DJ played both "In the Mood" and "Jump, Jive, and Wail" as swing songs. It's gotten to the point now where people expect my wife and I to dance at weddings and stuff, so I do. I may hate the songs, but people just want to see us dance, and I figure it's good exposure, so who cares. What am I going to do, refuse to dance and come across as some sort of musical snob?Nate Dogg wrote:I am not saying that everybody has to like wedding DJs. But, there are plenty of weddings out there that want/need YMCA and its ilk played; plenty of weddings are completly content to have "In the Mood" or "Jump, Jive, and Wail" be there token swing songs. Unless it was swing dancer wedding, I would not expect much in terms of "good" swing music. Wedding DJs have their job description and their mandate, rarely is it playing music that you can lindy hop to.
Interestingly, the DJ didn't JUST play those two songs. He played a 4 or 5 song set including Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, and this song that was pretty cool that I almost couldn't survive because it was so fast. It ended up being pretty fun, actually.
The down side was that playing 5 swing songs in a row isn't the best way to keep a crowd on the dance floor.
I think from now on, for weddings, I'll just bring my own music, I'm pretty sick of Jump Jive and Wail and In The Mood and shit like that. Just hand the guy the cd and say "play ALL of this"
.Harrison
www.lindyhopper.ca, Canada's Swing Site.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like too bad of an idea. I helped DJ at a wedding a few weeks ago, and when time came for the obligatory swing dance, I played Cab Calloway and Sidney Bechet. People seemed to like it. Of course, for the Sidney Bechet song, it was basically a jam with my wife and I dancing, but I've pretty much come to expect that. Having a partner to dance with definitely helps out.lindyholic wrote: I think from now on, for weddings, I'll just bring my own music, I'm pretty sick of Jump Jive and Wail and In The Mood and shit like that. Just hand the guy the cd and say "play ALL of this"
Harrison
-Jeremy
It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.
It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.
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KevinSchaper
- Posts: 277
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- Location: Eugene, OR
...and on the wedding dj discussion board:lindyholic wrote: I think from now on, for weddings, I'll just bring my own music, I'm pretty sick of Jump Jive and Wail and In The Mood and shit like that. Just hand the guy the cd and say "play ALL of this" :).
"Speaking of awful requests, I was working this wedding and this punk kid comes up and gives me a cd full of scratchy old swing songs and asks me to play 'em.. I mean come on, talk about horrible requests, it wasn't even swing music! So I put on some stuff from Swing Kids, he must have no idea there's better versions of this stuff!"
sorry to go back into debate mode, but there's one here i just couldn't take --
Damon wrote: "Is there some confusion about what bop is and how it differs from hard bop? What rock and roll is and how it differs from heavy metal? What Funk is and how it differs from hip-hop?"
Answer: Yes, of course there is.
Where would you pidgeonhole Beck? DJ Krush? Squirrel Nut Zippers? Loreena McKennitt? Andrew Bird? jeez... Miles Davis? etc. That's just off the top of my head...
People who make music just make music -- they mix up what they know and add their originality and try their best to make something good. If other people like it, they adopt it and put their spin on it. It's that simple. There are no "real" categories in music. We use categories just for convenience!... but we've been around this horse...
ok, go back to wedding talk. That's more fun anyway
-Yakov Chodosh.
Damon wrote: "Is there some confusion about what bop is and how it differs from hard bop? What rock and roll is and how it differs from heavy metal? What Funk is and how it differs from hip-hop?"
Answer: Yes, of course there is.
Where would you pidgeonhole Beck? DJ Krush? Squirrel Nut Zippers? Loreena McKennitt? Andrew Bird? jeez... Miles Davis? etc. That's just off the top of my head...
People who make music just make music -- they mix up what they know and add their originality and try their best to make something good. If other people like it, they adopt it and put their spin on it. It's that simple. There are no "real" categories in music. We use categories just for convenience!... but we've been around this horse...
ok, go back to wedding talk. That's more fun anyway
-Yakov Chodosh.
Except perhaps for Ornette Coleman and his followers, that is absolutely and completely not true. The "categories" to which you refer manifests the music theories behind every song out there. There are different paradigm music theories for jazz, blues, rock, etc., and sub-theories within those paradigms that most musicians very study and pay attention to in detail.Yakov wrote:People who make music just make music -- they mix up what they know and add their originality and try their best to make something good. If other people like it, they adopt it and put their spin on it. It's that simple. There are no "real" categories in music. We use categories just for convenience!... but we've been around this horse...
The best musicians very purposefully follow these music theories when composing and performing music. They purposefully place a swing rhythm with this tune, a cha-cha rhythm with that tune, and very consciously and purposefully follow very well-defined musical theories as to how to arrange the melody, and what notes in a scale to use in the melody, what chord progressions to use in this or that song....
Certain musicians definitely do cross genres and even cross-breed genres, even within a song, but that does not mean that those genres and categories don't exist. Similarly, colors blend together in the rainbow, but that does not mean that there is no difference between blue and red and, for that matter, purple (blue and red mixed together).
Moreover, saying that they just "make music" and implying that it is a random discovery process truly belittles the greatness of what musicians do and have discovered about music. Sometimes happy accidents seem to occur, but only after the musicians who make those happy accidents have built in years of study and practice into the "accident." Innovators do come along to extend the pioneers of music, but even they start from the established theories and progress from there, whether they know they are following those theories or not.
As for the difference between "groove" and "classic" swing, there are theoretical differences that explain the different "sound" of these two types of swing music. "Classic" rhythm sections, especially the bass players, sharply hit the rhythm hard and simply in order to be heard. That attack softened up slowly, but not until after amplification became good enough could the attack on the bass become smooth and sustained enough to sustain each beat from one strike to the next to create a prevailing deep tone instead of just a thump-thump-thump.
Lawrence wrote:
Except perhaps for Ornette Coleman and his followers, that is absolutely and completely not true. The "categories" to which you refer manifests the music theories behind every song out there. There are different paradigm music theories for jazz, blues, rock, etc., and sub-theories within those paradigms that most musicians very study and pay attention to in detail.
"At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject.
They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself,
to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling
a lot of notes one on top of the other. There’s no beat anymore. You can’t
keep time with your foot. There’s a new idea that consists in destroying
everything and find what’s shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all
tell a story that anyone can understand." -- Thelonious Monk
Right, so if you use Altavista translator on "they mix up what they know," you can translate that into Lawrence-speak and say "they study the paragdim music theories and pay attention to them in detail when creating music"Lawrence wrote:Except perhaps for Ornette Coleman and his followers, that is absolutely and completely not true. The "categories" to which you refer manifests the music theories behind every song out there. There are different paradigm music theories for jazz, blues, rock, etc., and sub-theories within those paradigms that most musicians very study and pay attention to in detail.
As Thelonious says -- "structure." Jazz, especially the kinds that we DJ, is very highly structured.I wasn't really suggesting that musicians are idiot savants who don't know what they're doing, or superbeings with a direct link to God... as a jazz pianist and trombonist, I know that ("except perhaps for Ornette Coleman and his followers") jazz improvising and songwriting is more like a creative rejiggering of the various cliche`s available... very mathematical... the opportunity for doing anything actually "original" in a way that "fits" is very small, in a sense... that's why you have to be brilliant to be prominent within the tradition, i.e. Armstrong, Ellington, etc.
BUT there is a ton of overlap between musical styles, and they do combine in very unpredictable ways -- jazz itself was created out of a ton of different cultural influences from all over the world... etcetera... so how can you say anything has a totally strict, pure definition? but i think we agree on this part.
-yakov