For all my stance on using non-swing music, and on what I think of electro-swing, I am curious about some of the interesting overlaps and experiments with old and new music. One that grabbed my curiosity was the Zoot Boots album mentioned on the Hey Mr Jesse podcasts – a collaboration of DJs mashing up … shall we say … unlikely combinations of modern and vintage music. While most of it doesn’t really float my boat, there were a couple of intriguing tracks in the mix (The Ace of Blue Skies, for its hilariously wonderful incongruity, and the first minute of the Tiger Rags mashup, which somehow, against all common sense, just seems to work)
Anyway – listening to these, the ridiculous though popped into my head: how hard can this be? To take an classic swing number, take a well known modern classic and mix them up in some ludicrous way which may or may not work (but which will almost certainly be an utter abomination). And … of course … that question can lead to a desire to take action… (anyway – what use is a bandwagon if no-one jumps on it?)
A few hours of monkey-see, monkey do experimentation later, I had my answer. It’s hard. Not to make the abomination – that part was easy, but to make the pieces fit in some way which vaguely makes sense – yes – it’s hard.
I feel a little reluctant to post about it here, but I’ve spent too much time on it not to at least blog about it, so with no further ado, for your delectation, enjoyment, utter horror (delete as appropriate), I present to you my first (and almost certainly my last) mashup – the Jeep Jockey Jumparound.
So in the final analysis… I’m not entirely sure if it’s worked. I don’t think it’s a marriage made in heaven, but neither do I think it’s a total disaster. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but I’ve spent more time on it than I’d intended, so am happy enough to leave it there. I can’t quite imagine the circumstances which would inspire me to play it for dancers.
But – as experiments go, it was fun to do 🙂
the idea works … but its a bit too busy … if you used an accapella rather than the whole hip hop track and cut it up more carefully (or time stretched it), and then used some selected more sparse loops rather than just the whole swing track then it would have more space …
but on the plus side i can totally hear what you were trying to do with it … which means you were on the right track, and the rest is just practice and time
anders
I did use an acapella – I don’t think I’d have tackled it if I hadn’t found one… and I found a breakdown of all the samples used in Jump Around, which helped a great deal. I didn’t want to mess with the structure of Jeep Jockey Jump – leaving it alone was one of my goals.
Likewise, the vocal samples were put in fairly painstakingly a bit at a time, and time-stretched/cut up to make them fit better. Sometimes that worked well, sometimes not (I hear more and more imperfections / mistakes the more I listen to it, which I suppose is normal)
Ultimately, I think that to do it well, I’d have needed to spend a whole lot more time… and I’d pretty much run out of patience by the time I stopped… for now, at least, I think I’ll leave it to the pros.
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