the music, part I: east coast swing & lindy hop

Buddy Holly & the Crickets performing on the Ed Sullivan Show; 1st December, 1957

As I said before, it's one thing to just listen to the music but it's a whole other ball game when you can feel it and, for me, that's one of the biggest reasons I love swing dancing so much - lindy hop/east coast swing and west coast swing both. In fact, that's probably the main reason I got into swing dancing in the first place.

Like most people, my early music tastes were influenced by my parents and what they had playing in our house when I was growing up. This music ranged from Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons, Rod Stewart and ABBA to Kenny Rogers, Foster & Allen and Daniel O'Donnell depending on who held sway on the radio at that moment or the level of punishment to be meted out. I even had a few records of my own including the evergreen soundtracks to Postman Pat, Winnie the Pooh and the Jungle Book, but it was a cassette tape (link added for the benefit of some) with the greatest hits of Buddy Holly & the Crickets that really grabbed me.

The Buddy Holly Story the musical hit Belfast not long after and I think I went to see it at least four times as I just couldn't get enough of it, and so Buddy, along with the help of the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, introduced me to rock'n'roll. This was at a time when my mates were listening to Guns'n'Roses, Coolio and Ace of Base and though I also soon succumbed to the lure of New Kids on the Block (who, interestingly enough, were the reason I decided to try breakdancing) I've always had a thing for older up-tempo rhythms and a craving to dance to them.

Rock'n'Roll remains my favourite music to dance to, as the playlist attached to this blog may suggest, and if you can hack the pace then Little Richard, Elvis, Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran and company just can't be beaten for fun. In fact, east coast swing was a product of this era as it was developed to accommodate the faster rhythms and to make swing dancing more accessible to the masses as the trickier parts of lindy hop, most significantly the 8-beat swing-out, were dropped to leave the simpler moves which then became a dancing style in its own right.

East Coast Swing was particularly championed by the Arthur Murray Studios - a chain of dance schools across the USA that is responsible for the 'Big Apple' routine and others, and incidentally provided a venue for some of the only live footage that still exists of a performance by Buddy Holly & the Crickets - and as the music took off so did the new dancing style.

Lindy Hop, however, is most famously danced to tunes from the Swing Era of the 20s-30s when the Big Band jazz bands, led by the likes of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington, played an upbeat blend of percussion, brass and woodwind with vocals by Ella Fitzgeralds and Billie Holidays laced on top. But, as much as I adore rock'n'roll, there are few things that can top dancing to a great live band playing the best the Swing Era has to offer and I have to give a special mention to Dana Masters & the Linley Hamilton Quartet who, to date, played the best gig I've ever swung at!

I don't really need to point it out but long before rock'n'roll arrived on the scene the Swing Era music produced plenty of fast music that got lindy hoppers up and popping (and all power to you if you can manage to stay on the dance floor without a defibrillator for the entirety of Benny Goodman's full 12-minute Carnegie Hall version of Sing, Sing, Sing with Gene Krupa going buck daft on the drums) but it is the slower, pulsing rhythms of Big Band music that really lend themselves to amazing lindy hop dancing.

I also couldn't possibly finish this post without mentioning electroswing. Generally, it is not for the faint-hearted - Sing Sing Sing clocks in around 110bpm (beats per minute), Jerry Lee Lewis' Great Balls of Fire burns nearer to 160bpm, but my favourite electroswing offering, Puttin' on the Ritz by Club des Belugas, rockets along at around 200bpm and will blow your mind and/or joints. This stuff is incredible for the odd dance here and there (not for a whole night, that would kill people) but electroswing, as part of the nu-jazz revival that started in the 90s, must be given a lot of credit for the re-emergence of swing dancing and therefore the amazing scene that we have today.

Next up, music for west coast swing...