SwingDJs

Hi there,

last week I had a Blues Dance workshop with an pretty old guy, which I do not doubt, that he has a lot of experience.

We went through various songs to determine, what kind of music it is and what kind of dance ("One Step", "Two Step", Swing) we should dance to them. By his definition Swing music is only, when you can hear the syncopation between the up and off beat (1 ... and 2) and nowhere else like 2 ... and 3 in the rhythm.

He calls the music of this song "two step":

http://www.amazon.de/Who-Ya-Hunchin/dp/B001S41DRG

I understood "Two Step" as a category of dances, where there are only single or hold steps and not as a music style. Beside that this song totally swings to me and even though there is no syncopation in the beat, the rest of the instruments play lots of syncopations, which don't have to be on 1 and 2 or 3 and 4 and so on for me to swing.
If he's true, then so many songs by typical Swing artists are not Swing songs.

I found on the web, that Swing is just a feeling and there are no real musical characteristics for it.

Please, help me out!

Not calling this swing and claiming that you should not lindy hop to it sounds bizarre. After all, this was what they played for the lindy hoppers at the Savoy.

Who Ya Hunchin' by Chick Webb. It's 1930s classic swing.

As the conversation was at a Blues workshop, I'm guessing that the guy might define swing as having a slower tempo than the Chick Webb song. Do you have an example of a track that he defines as swing?

The song he called Swing actually also had a straight beat, I think, but very slow walking base and only a female voice singing. He defined it Swing because of the singer. I agreed to that I didn't remember the song's name.
But when they played Who Ya Hunchin' by Chick Webb (to me THE typical Swing artist), I was totally confused/annoyed. He says, one can totally dance Swing to it, but it is not Swing! wtf ...

As experienced as he may be...do you think he might be young enough that his opinions about dances and music are influenced from being a teenager in the 40's-50's?

He's still taking dance lessons. Perhaps he was born in the 30's, not a teenager/twenty-something going out the clubs in the 30's.

Note that the dance that became the breakaway and the lindy hop was, in fact, called two-step in the mid to late twenties. No doubt there were people into the thirties, when Chick Webb recorded that track, that still called the dance two-step.

(Aside: two-step is a notoriously annoying name: there are many completely unrelated dances that are called two-step.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBHNgV6_znU ?

It seems like he is categorizing the music to his own dance needs and not by the type of music it really is.

It's like saying 'this music is good to eat Cheerios to', but it is no good for eating raisin bran to'. So that makes it Cheerios music. To him.

Any good? Make sense? I'm tired!

Yeah it sounds like he's defining the music by what type of dance he'd do to it. The equivalent of "this is a balboa song" or "this is a lindy song". In ballroom circles they'd say "this is a rhumba" ...or a foxtrot ...or a quickstep etc.

It's all one's own interpretation: That Chick Webb song might not be for "swing" dancing for him, but it's sure as hell "swing music" by any musical interpretation.

What really annoyed was that he wasn't saying, what kind of dance one should dance to the songs, but this song is NOT swing, even if we (dumbass) Lindy Hoppers/Balboa dancers could swing to it. NOT swing, because of no syncopations in the beat ... Thus, lots of DJs have no idea of Swing, when they play stuff like this song saying they play Swing...

Balboa by the way is also two-step dance he says.

Then the old guy is ignorant.

that's what you say.

however, if you are right and the song swings even with no syncopation beat: what makes this or any song in general swing?

categorizing a dance by its basic rhythm is so nonsense to. beside the fact that it's pretty boring to stick to one rhythm all the time, the way of doing the steps totally differ the dance types. analogously, I thought, music swings mainly because of the non rhythm instruments...

dukeyduke wrote:NOT swing, because of no syncopations in the beat ...

Considering that there's a whole mess of syncopations being put in the whole way through the track, I'd say that's a very odd conclusion for him to draw....

syncopations by the rhythm section, here drums... weird argument, right?

First off: chill the $^&# out. It's not worth getting annoyed because not everyone agrees on the definition of a word. "Swing" is a vague term, and has meant different things to different people at different times.

Second, the rhythm section here is piano, bass, guitar, and drums--not just drums.

Third, the rhythm section is what, to me, causes this track to swing. If you listen carefully, the four instruments don't hit together. Some are a little ahead, some a little behind. You get a "fat" beat. A beat that's stretched out in time, that oozes a little. To me, that's the one defining characteristic of "swing", if I really had to pick one. (With a little Google magic you can find several threads on this forum about swing, the rhythm section, and rhythmic displacement (Kyle loved that term).)

Fourth, I suspect what the gentleman at the dance was thinking of was the strong accent on 2 & 4 that (lots of) swing music has (hey, know how you clap on 2 & 4 in a jam?). This particular track (and lots of others) has the brass on 1 & 3 standing out, and the 2 & 4 pattern gets muddled or hidden by that, so it's harder to hear. But I'm speculating here--maybe he's thinking about something else.

Oh, and fifth: I can't believe we're having this thread again. :o)