exciting high-energy mid-tempo swing

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fredo
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exciting high-energy mid-tempo swing

#1 Post by fredo » Sun Aug 24, 2008 11:30 pm

<divergent thread evolution>
Haydn wrote:One of the biggest problems I have when DJing is finding enough exciting high-energy mid-tempo material. I've got more than enough 200 BPM+ songs, but it's the ones around 150 BPM that are really useful for DJing.
Does anyone think this is an indication of a difference (one of many) between social dancing today and social dancing 'back in the day'?

Or did most of the mid tempo songs that were recorded back then tend to have more of a ballad-like feel, or "sweeter" sound to them? -- and is this a type of song that is somewhat underrepresented in swing scenes today?

Perhaps when bands wanted to play exciting high energy songs they typically played them faster than what we consider "mid tempo" to mean these days.

lipi
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#2 Post by lipi » Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:23 am

i asked norma miller once whether people danced faster, slower, or about the same back in the day. (i also seem to recall frankie getting the same question at one of his q&a sessions.) the answer i remember was that no, the tempos for social dancing weren't different from what we were hearing that night.

i have four hypotheses for the "old music is so much faster" bias. two are of the "live music wasn't faster, just the recorded stuff" sort, while two are of the "the dancing was different" sort.

1) when bands recorded, they went for high energy, exciting things, and they played them with as much fire as possible. i think that leads to higher tempos. i know from (amateur) orchestra, that whenever we got excited, we tended to rush. pros will do better, no doubt, but i still think it happens: excitement and high tempo are closely related.

2) the 78 rpm record allowed 3:30 or 4:00 or something per side (john?), and to fit as much of an arrangement and as many solos as possible, bands may have just played faster to get it on there.

3) people didn't do just one dance. in the modern lindy world, most dancers know just one dance: lindy. more advanced dancers may know bal or even shag, but beginners won't. at the savoy, the lindy hoppers knew the walk and possibly other dances. it's a whole lot easier to dance lindy at 240 bpm when the last dance was a stroll around the room instead of another fast lindy.

4) the level of dancing was, on average, probably lower and the dancing was wilder, less polished. people did not take lessons, and not everyone went out every night and practised every afternoon, of course. norma has confirmed that the level was, indeed, lower. i think it's easier to dance at a high tempo when your dancing isn't clean and you don't care about it not being clean. what's holding back a lot of dancers to slower tempos (at least around here) is not that they cannot sort their feet out in time for the 8, but that they insist on getting all the way around and having their feet *just so* in time for the 8. people are, i suspect, a lot more dogmatic about their dancing now than they were 80 years ago. there are right and wrong ways of doing things, moves you learned in class that you want to do just so, etc.

(now, of course, someone could start some crazy debate on what "level of dancing" exactly means and what scale you use for something like that, but i hope we don't have to slide down that path.)

right. some of that was tangentially related, i'm sure.

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dogpossum
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#3 Post by dogpossum » Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:35 am

I have to say that I don't have a massive problem finding high energy old school stuff in the 140-160 bpm range. Granted, I'd like more of this action as I tend to play more in this tempo range as I transition up and down (or rest at this 'trough') on my 'wave'... but there seems to be a fair stack of it about. Though I don't have the most enormous collection or the widest musical knowledge.

...there's an interesting comment about tempos/rhythms in the liner notes of the Buddy Johnson collection 'Buddy Johnson and his orchestra featuring Ella Johnson: Walk em The Decca Sessions'

Image
'Walk 'Em' reflects an inspired idea that Buddy Johnson first tried out in the mid 40s. Buddy himself explained at the time "I felt sorry for the guys and gals who weren't expert dancers, so I fooled around with this idea of having my band play numbers using a simple distinctive beat. ...So I wrote this little number 'Walk 'Em; and tried it out on the people at The Savoy. It was written in walk tempo, I figured that since everyone knows how to walk, everyone should be able to dance to this rhythm. The numbers went over big - and now we try to arrange all our dance numbers in the same walk-em tempo."
The implication is of course that it's not just tempos but types of rhythm that are challenging. I guess then, as now, there're people who weren't great dancers or weren't terribly fit... it'd be interesting to see if the comparative affluence of contemporary swing dancers contributes to their relative discomfort with higher tempos... though that's getting scarily close to racial essentialism. When I read 'mid-40s', though I'm also hearing 'moving away from the heyday of lindy hop'. And away from my own musical preferences.


For me, as a dancer and DJ, it's the complexity and challenge that makes lindy so fully sick. I prefer something that's going to keep me interested, mentally and physically. But as a DJ working a relatively small scene who likes to get repeat gigs, it makes more sense to offer a wider range of tempos and rhythms, especially if I'm working a mixed crowd.

... but I haven't run out of high energy mid-tempo stuff from the 1930s and early 40s yet.

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#4 Post by djstarr » Mon Aug 25, 2008 1:20 pm

IMHO the person who I've heard recently do the best job of mid-tempo high energy fun to dance to songs is Mike Faltesek. The songs he plays are very rhythmically interesting - in particular I loved his set late night at CJ this year.

Falty - if you are listening and willing - care to post your set list from that night? I remember lots of Slim&Slam sounding songs, but it was good Slim&Slam, not cheezy overplayed Slim&Slam :P

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Eyeball
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#5 Post by Eyeball » Mon Aug 25, 2008 3:32 pm

Some middle tempo items I like-

LOOSE LID SPECIAL - TOMMY DORSEY, Plus he has so many other instrumentals in the 40 - 42 period that fall right in that same groove.
SWEETER THAN THE SWEETEST - GLENN MILLER
GOTTA BE THIS OR THAT - BENNY GOODMAN
HERMAN AT THE SHERMAN - WOODY HERMAN
THE MOLE - HARRY JAMES


Just so many more by so many bands.........
Will big bands ever come back?

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#6 Post by Haydn » Mon Aug 25, 2008 5:24 pm

djstarr wrote:IMHO the person who I've heard recently do the best job of mid-tempo high energy fun to dance to songs is Mike Faltesek. The songs he plays are very rhythmically interesting - in particular I loved his set late night at CJ this year.
What is 'CJ' :?:

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#7 Post by lipi » Mon Aug 25, 2008 6:39 pm

camp jitterbug. it's one of the bigger dance weeks/weekends in the u.s. it's held in seattle.

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trev
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#8 Post by trev » Mon Aug 25, 2008 7:11 pm

I think lipi hit the nail on the head. Back then, the band would play a variety of styles and tempos: a few killer dillers, some nice ballads, maybe a rhumba or even a waltz, and the people would dance whatever they could. That might mean a bit of foxtrot here and there and some lindy where appropriate. There were plenty of mid tempo songs recorded, but a decent proportion of them are ballads not suited to the high energy of Lindy Hop.

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#9 Post by Haydn » Tue Aug 26, 2008 2:41 am

lipi wrote:i asked norma miller once whether people danced faster, slower, or about the same back in the day. (i also seem to recall frankie getting the same question at one of his q&a sessions.) the answer i remember was that no, the tempos for social dancing weren't different from what we were hearing that night.
I'm sure I read a quote from Norma Miller where they compared black and white dancers, and she said the black dancers danced fast because they didn't want the the white dancers to take their dance. Which suggests that some of the early black dancers danced faster than dancers from later periods.

If you listen to music from the different years in the 1930s, the average tempo seems to slow down over the years, being noticeable slower at the end of the 1930s than the beginning. And this slowing tempo coincided with the mass popularity of swing in America.

lipi wrote:4) the level of dancing was, on average, probably lower and the dancing was wilder, less polished ... i think it's easier to dance at a high tempo when your dancing isn't clean and you don't care about it not being clean. What's holding back a lot of dancers to slower tempos (at least around here) is ... they insist on getting all the way around and having their feet *just so* in time for the 8. People are, i suspect, a lot more dogmatic about their dancing now than they were 80 years ago.
Good point. And I don't think they did triple steps in the early 30s did they?

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#10 Post by djstarr » Tue Aug 26, 2008 2:47 pm

Haydn wrote:
djstarr wrote:IMHO the person who I've heard recently do the best job of mid-tempo high energy fun to dance to songs is Mike Faltesek. The songs he plays are very rhythmically interesting - in particular I loved his set late night at CJ this year.
What is 'CJ' :?:
Camp Jitterbug. Biggest lindy hop event in Seattle - runs over Memorial Day [last weekend in May]. This was the 8th year?

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DJ Click Play
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#11 Post by DJ Click Play » Wed Sep 03, 2008 10:30 am

To me there is a point where things change from dancing to a cardio workout. Sure, you kept up and hit most of the swing-outs on time, but did you really have fun and is it really dancing? Challenging, yes. Not so sure about the 'nice fun time' part. IMHO of course.

I've always let the kids take the floor and try their hand at aerials and endurance when the BPM gets too high. But then I'm a Lindy fanatic.

The wife is reading this over my shoulder and just called me a wimp. She says perhaps we need to learn Balboa. Meh.

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#12 Post by Mr Awesomer » Wed Sep 03, 2008 10:35 am

DJ Click Play wrote:To me there is a point where things change from dancing to a cardio workout. Sure, you kept up and hit most of the swing-outs on time, but did you really have fun and is it really dancing? Challenging, yes. Not so sure about the 'nice fun time' part. IMHO of course.
It only takes a quick view of Showdown Liberation finals to see that 1) it's fun and 2) it's dancing.
Reuben Brown
Southern California

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fredo
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#13 Post by fredo » Wed Sep 03, 2008 10:42 am

DJ Click Play wrote:To me there is a point where things change from dancing to a cardio workout. Sure, you kept up and hit most of the swing-outs on time, but did you really have fun and is it really dancing? Challenging, yes. Not so sure about the 'nice fun time' part. IMHO of course.

I've always let the kids take the floor and try their hand at aerials and endurance when the BPM gets too high. But then I'm a Lindy fanatic.

The wife is reading this over my shoulder and just called me a wimp. She says perhaps we need to learn Balboa. Meh.
So are you saying that, for you, dancing faster than mid-tempo changes the dance from swing dancing to a cardio workout?

if so, that's a pity.

Can't it be both? with emphasis still on the dancing and having fun part...

Regardless, mid-tempo swing represents the median and the mean tempo for most scenes and likely is the reason DJs are always on the hunt for more high-energy mid-tempo swing.

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#14 Post by DJ Click Play » Wed Sep 03, 2008 11:00 am

fredo wrote:So are you saying that, for you, dancing faster than mid-tempo changes the dance from swing dancing to a cardio workout?

if so, that's a pity.

Can't it be both? with emphasis still on the dancing and having fun part...
define 'mid-tempo'....
fredo wrote:Regardless, mid-tempo swing represents the median and the mean tempo for most scenes and likely is the reason DJs are always on the hunt for more high-energy mid-tempo swing.
I think Rocket 95 is about my fave tempo. Not sure if that is 'mid'-tempo or not.

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fredo
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#15 Post by fredo » Wed Sep 03, 2008 11:12 am

DJ Click Play wrote:
define 'mid-tempo'....

uh, I think that's what I'm asking you...

you wrote: "To me there is a point where things change from dancing to a cardio workout. Sure, you kept up and hit most of the swing-outs on time, but did you really have fun and is it really dancing? Challenging, yes. Not so sure about the 'nice fun time' part. IMHO of course."

You said there's a point where things change....I was wondering what that was...
DJ Click Play wrote:
I think Rocket 95 is about my fave tempo. Not sure if that is 'mid'-tempo or not.
sorry, I'm not familiar with that song.



also agree with Mr. Awesomer -- Ask Norma Miller if dancing to Jumpin at the Woodside is "fun" or not... I know we're just talking about your opinion, which is yours to have, but I think the desire for more high-energy mid-tempo music has more to do with getting more tempo variety in sets, and not as much to do with mid-tempo being more "fun" to dance to, in my opinion.

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