If you’ve been swing dancing for any length of time, you’ll have heard of the Big Apple. Most of you have probably learned the Big Apple, or at least part of it. You know – the less fiendish parts, up to London Bridge, before it all gets a bit crazy.
Well – crazier. Anyway – after a recent workshop, and watching various badly synced versions on YouTube, I got it into my head that the source material is in serious need of fixing.
Following on from At The Chase 2018: Competition DJing Pt 2 (Strictly Lindy) – this is the final part of my Chase competition DJing… and far and away the most challenging to find music for – for two reasons.
First – it’s probably the highest-level competition I’ve yet to play music for. Even though this is just a qualifying round for the cup (the final will be in 2019) – qualifying for the qualifiers is far from easy… Secondly – unlike the other Chase competitions, I was providing the music for the final. So… no pressure.
I was thinking about a few of the stranger things that have happened in the time I’ve been DJing, and thought it would be amusing to make a list for your entertainment. So in no particular order:
Another set-list – this time (on request) from yesterday’s hugely enjoyable post-workshop dance at the wonderful T C R Hub in Barnard Castle.
This post is a follow-on from At The Chase 2018: Competition DJing Pt 1 (Mix & Match) – where I started to chronicle my decisions behind choosing music for the Chase Festival competitions. The Strictly Lindy prelims had the same format as the Mix & Match – which is to say three heats, each with three songs, each song for 60 – 70 seconds, two medium and one fast. Nice and simple.
As before, my key criteria were to have songs that were fun, swung hard, and that maintained a good energy for the time I’d be playing them. If I were playing the whole song it’d be a different matter – but a one phrase section of quiet can eat a large chunk out of a sixty second running time, and I wanted people to really have a chance to go to town.
So here we go…
The first time I went to Herrang – which all those years ago was pretty much our only way of getting to quality Lindy Hop classes – I found a musical paradise. There was SO MUCH INCREDIBLE MUSIC that I’d never heard the like of before – and I came back home with songs like Jeep Jockey Jump and One O’Clock Jump ricocheting around in my brain. At that time, I had no idea what these songs even were – the word “swing” just suggested some guy called Glenn Miller, and Glenn Miller meant exactly one thing – In the Mood. I’d barely even heard of Count Basie… but I absolutely had to find out more.
This year, I was lucky enough to be invited to the Chase Festival in Heidelberg as head DJ. I’ve had that position at DJam for the last decade, but Chase is a different proposition – a considerably larger event with nearly a thousand attendees, and one of the highest profile Lindy Hop events in Europe, so it was very flattering to be invited to take up such a role.
Part of my job was to prepare music for competitions, which is simultaneously fun and stressful. It’s a huge responsibility – you need to find music which challenges dancers, but brings out the best in them, entertains the audience, preferably without being too obvious and using the same old songs time after time after time. Lindyhopper’s Delight, for example, is an amazing competition tune, but so well-known by now that most experienced dancers could probably hum it backwards. Yes – I will use it, but I try not to rely on songs like that.
And – of course, you need the songs to fit whatever criteria the organisers have requested – plus you you need enough suitable songs for the number of heats and competitors… and crucially, you need a good number in reserve for any last-second changes of mind, and – from past experience – any unforeseen circumstances such as those extra two heats which are suddenly sprung on you without warning, or the two extra spotlight couples we suddenly need to fit into the only-just-long-enough jam song…
Luckily for me, the Chase team are extremely experienced and polished at running these competitions, and I wasn’t caught out by anything like that – but experience has taught me always to prepare well.
What I want to do in this post is to go through the various Chase competitions, and talk about the music I chose, and why I chose it. So without further ado…
I was actually just looking for some recordings from the wonderfully named Club Hangover, and Google brought me here. Started in 1998, and run by the gentleman above – Dave Radlauer – there’s an incredible wealth of information to be found here about Jazz, Swing, and many of the great artists.
