Tag: <span>lindy</span>

The movie Hellzapoppin’ features, as most swing dancers know, the greatest Lindy Hop routine ever to appear in the cinema – in a scene preceded by an absolutely fantastic jam featuring some of the great names of jazz.

This year, a German company named Anolis Entertainment has released it on Bluray – and the quality is absolutely stunning.

So naturally, I’ve dusted off my retiming project!

General rambles Videos

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…

Competitions DJing General rambles Music

Oh – the dream of the perfect swing tune. Those gold-dust tracks – those beautiful, amazing tracks which everyone is going to fall in love with, and which cannot fail to set the dance floor ablaze every time they’re used. All you need is a collection filled with nothing but those, and you have it made as a DJ.

It’s nice to dream. Sadly, there’s no such thing – sure there are plenty of amazing tracks out there, but no single track can possibly fit every mood, every moment that you’re going to have to fill as a DJ. The best tracks in your collection can fall completely flat if you play them at the wrong moment. On the flipside, some of the most unlikely ones can work really well if you play them at just the right moment…

Remember – not every song is Lindy Hopper’s Delight. And even Lindy Hopper’s Delight can become Lindy Hopper’s Oh Dear God Not Again if you’re not careful.

DJing General rambles Music

Listen to the whole track before ever DJing it. That may seem self-evident, but given the time pressures of modern living, and the urgency need we can feel to build up a great collection of music as quickly as possible, it’s easy to get half-way through a track, go: “This is a great version! Next!” and add it for later DJing.

General rambles Live Music

Tonight brought us a very pleasant surprise. We’ve just come back from a concert at the ever-amazing Sage, which was a recreation of the Benny Goodman Sextet – or at…

Live Music

Music Music of the Moment

Music Music of the Moment

[8tracks width=”350″ height=”300″ float=”left” playops=”” url=”http://8tracks.com/mixes/262804″] 8Track Time! And yes, it’s eight repeats of the same tune. And yes – that probably seems a little crazy, but Joshua (he who…

8 track Music