Tag Archives: Ballroom

Music and Dance

The Pink Martini Solution

Not all artists are created equal when it comes to creating dance-able music.  For instance, one of my favorite artists of all time is John Coltrane.  Do you see him well represented in the music4dance catalog?  Absolutely not.   Because a consistent tempo just isn’t a core part of his music.  Which is part of the appeal when listening, but doesn’t work particularly well when trying to Lindy Hop.

Towards the opposite end of the spectrum, sits Pink Martini.  They are a band that plays a combination of original works and updated covers of classic melodies.  Many of both types of song are in a musical style that co-evolved with a partner dance.  Take “Let’s Never Stop Falling In Love“, which is a classic Tango if I ever did hear one, but still has the unique Pink Martini flare.  Or “Amado Mio“, which has a extremely dance-able Rumba beat.  And don’t forget “Hang On Little Tomato“, a wonderful Foxtrot as long as you can dance through the lyrics without cracking up, or possibly tearing up.  That little tomato has quite a challenge ahead of him!  And if you are up for a challenge yourself, try to West Coast Swing to “Hey Eugene” while keeping a straight face.

Pink Martini’s catalog is both broad and deep and most of their songs are well suited to partner dances.  Check them out on music4dance.net and if you like what you hear, let me know and I’ll catalog some more of their songs.

About music4dance

The Two Questions that Inspired Music4Dance

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As a beginning ballroom dancer there were two questions that kept coming up:

  1. What are some songs that I could play to practice the dance that I’m currently learning?
  2. Which dance style(s) can I dance to this song that I’m currently listening to? For instance, would this work for a Cha Cha or an East Coast Swing?

The dances page on the site is the beginning of an answer to question #1.

Dances
A partial snapshot of the Dance Style page from music4dance as of January 22nd, 2024

And, the counter page is the beginning of an answer to question #2.

music4dance beat counter
Snapshot of the beat counter/dance finder as of January 22nd, 2024

Which of these questions is most important to you? Or what other questions are more important to you?

If you’re a dancer or teacher, what are the questions you ask?

Archive

Where to Start?

I’ve been spinning my wheels a bit with respect to this blog. It is much easier for me to write code than to write prose, but I realize that for anyone to see what I’ve been doing coding-wise, I need to start publicizing it. And one of the ways to do that is to start blogging about it. I had some grand ambitions to try to set up categories and start writing tutorials about the relationship between music and dance and have a bunch of thoughts around both those things, but nothing has quite gelled. Meanwhile, I’m continuing to spend time coding and cataloging.

So I’m going to go back to my original intention of writing small posts about what I’m currently thinking about, as well as doing a bit of catch up about what I’ve been doing with the main site and I’ll let you vote with your comments about what you want to see both on the blog/documentation and with the site and its features.

Do you think this post is small enough?