#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.