competition giveaway - 'Swing Dance' by Scott Cupit

In a proud first for this blog I have been given three copies of Scott Cupit's book Swing Dance to give away!

I'm looking forward to getting stuck into my own copy as soon as it arrives but if you fancy one for yourself then all you have to do is head over to the Swing Slate's Facebook page, like it, and share the competition image!

The book is released on Thursday 17th September and this competition shall run until midnight on the following Thursday (24th); which gives me a week to come up with a novel way for selecting the three winners...

And in the mean time, here is what the book's publishers have to say about it:

With all things vintage enjoying a boom worldwide, swing dancing has well and truly swung back into fashion. From vintage festivals and tea dances to weekend socials and hundreds of weekly classes held around the world, multiple forms of the dance that was created in late 1920s Harlem by Frankie Manning are growing ever more popular.

Swing Dance explores the vibrant contemporary swing dance scene, looking at the different dance styles and the associated culture, community and fashion. Illustrated with vintage and contemporary photography, as well as specially commissioned step-by-step guides, it provides everything you need to know, whether you fancy kicking up your heels in the Charleston or mastering the Lindy Hop ‘swing out’.

The four major dance styles are covered – Charleston, Collegiate Shag, Balboa and Lindy Hop, including the Strolls, which are guaranteed to fill the dance floor. Each chapter begins with an overview of the fascinating evolution of the dance style; ‘Get the Look’ examines the fashions for guys and girls, including hair and make-up, and a clothing, shoes and accessories checklist; while ‘The Music’ suggests the top ten tunes to practise to. Then follows a breakdown of the basic step patterns upon which the dance is built, and a guide to some of the key moves. There are also insider tips from old-timers and today’s leading swing dancers as well as fun, easy-to-follow page-embedded video demonstrations produced exclusively for the book and accessible via scannable QR codes.

Good luck!

All The Cats Join In - Benny Goodman

One of the regular items that featured in the daily meetings in Herräng were bygone video clips chosen by Lennart Westerlund and others of swing bands, jazz bands, dancers and movies. This was one of my favourites.

Written and performed by Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, "All The Cats Join In" was one of two contributions by Goodman that featured in the 1946 Disney animated classic "Make Mine Music" - a musical anthology film made up of 10 unrelated short movies.

This style of film enabled Disney and other studios to keep producing motion pictures during the Second World War as many illustrators were drafted into the army, leaving behind many more unfinished stories. So by creating 'package films' that contained a collection of short movies (and usually lacked a coherent theme) the studios could make the most of what they had.

swing slate 7: Frankie's music moments

Chick Webb - Frankie's favourite resident orchestra leader at the Savoy Ballroom

I recently read Frankie's autobiography and it's a cracking read for anyone who wants to get a better idea of the history of Lindy hop as well as the life of its greatest exponent (and thanks to Scott Magowan for lending me it!) but it also listed a few tracks that were especially prominent in Frankie's memories so I have taken seven of them and have provided a little explanation for why they featured.

• Christopher Columbus • Although Frankie started his dancing career at the Alhambra Ballroom in Harlem it was at the Savoy Ballroom where things really took off and he recalls that, every Saturday when the dance contests were in full swing, 'Christopher Columbus' was the tune regularly chosen by the orchestra leader. The orchestra was usually one of the house bands who don't appear to be on youtube but in this instance I suppose we'll just have to make do with a version by the King of Swing himself, Benny Goodman.

• Clap Hands! Here Comes Charlie • As a great example of kind of rarefied air that Frankie was breathing on a regular basis, he witnessed numerous "Battle of Bands" in the Savoy between some of the luminaries of the Swing Era. Count Basie and Benny Goodman (along with Gene Krupa) occasionally played in the Savoy but in Frankie's mind at least, no one out-swung Chick Webb, and 'Clap Hands! Here Comes Charlie' was one of Chick's most swingin'est tunes.

• Down South Camp Meeting • Frankie shaped Lindy hop in a way like no one else: the crouched posture, breaks, and ensemble routines amongst other things were all his creation but it is air steps for which he is best known and it was during a dance contest at the Savoy where he and Frieda Washington first debuted the revolutionary pattern and 'Down South Camp Meeting' was the tune, played specially by Chick Webb, that accompanied them. Again, I can't find any record of Chick's version so heeeeeere's Benny!

• Posin' • As I have just said, Frankie also introduced 'breaks' into Lindy hop by freezing on a natural pause in the rhythm until the music picked up again and he recalls that Jimmy Lunceford's record 'Posin'' was the one that first gave him the inspiration.

• Stompy Jones • Frankie's first ever stage show happened to coincide with a one-week residency of Duke Ellington. He remembers being reduced to a shivering wreck at the thought of performing with a jazz legend already in his prime and when he arrived at rehearsals and witnessed every other act handing music over to 'the Duke' when he had none to give it didn't help allay any fears of being found out for being an amateur! When asked for music suggestions, Frankie offered a few more familiar Chick Webb tunes as he was unaware of Duke's reputation for rarely playing the work of other musicians but in the end they settled on Stompy Jones and as you can well imagine, Frankie made it work.

•  Every Tub • Frankie confessed that, sometimes, he just liked to show off and two of his favourite records for doing that were 'Jumpin' at the Woodside' or 'Every Tub' by Count Basie. Woodside gets a lot of airtime so in this instance I have plumped for the other one!

• Shiny Stockings • And finally, I couldn't possibly make a mini music playlist about Frankie if it didn't include his favourite record of all time: 'Shiny Stockings' by Count Basie.

the origins of Lindy Hop

the Lindy hop family tree

In one of my first posts I briefly touched on lindy hop genealogy and how it subsequently spawned a huge variety of new styles but I think it's important to mention just exactly how Lindy hop came to exist in the first place.

I'm not going to ramble ad nauseam about everything there is to know - for that there is wikipedia and the joys that an afternoon of clicking on blue links can bring - but on the off-chance your next pub quiz features a round on Lindy hop then hopefully this will have you covered. That said, if anyone wants to see an incredibly thorough family tree of the extended swing family then LindyPenguin offers an fantastic flowchart showing just that.

It's also again worth highlighting that west coast swing owes as much to lindy hop as east coast swing so hopefully no one of a westie persuasion will be put off from reading on!

The two oldest styles perched at the top of the Lindy hop tree, Jazz and Two Step, were popular at the turn of the 20th Century and came from quite different backgrounds and cultures. Jazz drew heavily from African American roots whilst Two Step was more popular within white communities but the evolution of the Charleston was notable for its more mainstream popularity as it was danced in all corners of the USA.

With the advent of the 1920s a style of dancing called the Breakaway had developed in Harlem, New York which combined aspects of Jazz, Two Step, Charleston and other Ragtime dances to create a partner dance that, revolutionary at the time, incorporated the eponymous 'breakaway'. Up to this point, solo dances were... well... solo, and partner dances involved a two-handed connection between lead and follow at all times but in the breakaway partners would switch between the two-handed 'closed' position and a novel one-handed 'open' position.

Then, by the late 1920s and with influences from the Breakaway and original aspects from the Charleston and solo Jazz, Lindy hop got its major breakthrough with Harlem once again front and centre with the jewel of its crown, the Savoy Ballroom, considered its rightful home.

The Savoy hosted regular dance contests and socials and legend has it that it was at one of these events in 1928 that a newspaper reporter happened to ask one of the guys dancing for the name of dance style he was so impressively performing and was given the response: "It's the Lindy hop!"

The dancer in question was George "Shorty" Snowden (nicknamed for his diminutive stature and also for whom the "shorty George" jazz step was named) and he is widely recognised as being one of the originators of the dance as well as one of its greatest proponents - both in terms of his reputation as one of the finest dancers to ever grace the Savoy and his establishment of the first professional Lindy hop troupe: the Shorty Snowden Dancers.

Shorty's inspiration for the name "Lindy hop" came from the (then) recently occurred first non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris by Charles Lindbergh. Several newspapers, including the Chicago Daily Tribune*, reported the momentous event with the headline "Lindy hops..." and on Shorty's appropriation it became associated with the new dance style he and others were popularising. [*link to archived copy of that newspaper edition detailing a subsequent trip by Lindbergh to St Louis]

However, Shorty and the rest of the Savoy originators of Lindy hop danced a style that would be almost unrecognisable to many of today's enthusiasts as it showcased obvious ballroom influences through an upright dancing posture and it wasn't until the arrival of a new kid on the block, a certain Frankie Manning, that the now ubiquitous Lindy shape began to proliferate.

Combined with Frankie's obvious talent for dancing, the striking visual effect, according to observers, of a style and stance that made him look like he was 'flying' meant that his new posture was soon the one being replicated throughout the Savoy and his invitation to join "Kat's Korner" - an area of the Savoy dancefloor inhabited by the best of the best - further cemented Frankie's growing reputation.

But what truly launched Frankie into the Lindy hop pantheon was arguably his greatest contribution to this dance style: Frankie's creation of aerial moves or "airsteps" in 1935.

Inspired by the way Shorty often finished dances with his dance partner, Beatrice "Big Bea" Gay (who towered over Shorty by a considerable margin), comically carrying him off on her back, Frankie and his partner Frieda Washington spent several weeks in his mother's apartment with a mattress on the floor (initially raising the suspicions of his mother) devising a way to go one better and safely throw Frieda over his shoulder in time to the music.

A dance contest hosted in the Savoy provided the perfect opportunity for Frankie and Frieda to introduce their genius to the masses and when it culminated in a dance-off with Shorty and Big Bea competing against Frankie and Frieda the stage was set.

Shorty and Big Bea opted to go first but after two neck-and-neck rounds it came to Frankie and Frieda to offer their third and final response and they flawlessly executed the "over-the-back" to send 2,000 Savoy spectators into euphoria.

Frankie also introduced ensemble routines, breaks and a host of other moves to the Lindy hop lexicon that are now commonplace but it was his tireless promotional work in his later life along with other original Lindy luminaries such as Norma Miller - pushing Lindy into new corners of the world and fanning the flames of its popularity - that led to the swing revival of the 1980s that spawned the substantial global swing community that exists today and that makes people like me very happy indeed.

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...