Tag Archives: Swing

Special Occasions

We’d like to dance a “real” partner dance as the first dance at our wedding (Part I: We already chose our song)

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Wedding season is upon us, and one of the things that come with weddings is receptions with first dances, father/daughter dances, mother/son dances, mother/daughter dances, and any other variation you can think of. I think it’s extra special when those dances are recognizably partner dances like Foxtrot, Rumba, or Swing. Of course, I have a bit of a bias.

If you want to find a dance that fits the song you love, here are some things that can help. In my next post, I’ll cover the other direction – finding a song to fit your dance.

First, consider visiting your local dance studio and asking a professional. The other professional that could help is your wedding DJ; sometimes, they are also dance teachers or at least know a dance teacher to connect you with.

In tandem with going to a professional, some features of music4dance.net can help. The first is to try searching for your song – you can type the title into the search box in the menu bar or on the Song Library page. If it’s a particularly popular song, you might also include the artist to see if you can get to the specific version of the song. But oftentimes, variations on a song by different artists still maintain enough of the same characteristics to be danced to the same dance. So be creative in your search and see what you come up with.

For example, try typing “Fly me to the moon” into the search bar – including the quotes to get songs with that full title rather than all the songs with those keywords. And we’re probably most interested in the Frank Sinatra version, so scroll down to that or add Sinatra (outside of the quotes) to the search.

You can already see which dances folks in the music4dance community have voted on to dance to this song. There is quite a spectrum. If you click on the song title, you will get more details. Among other things that will show you that Slow Foxtrot is the most-voted dance for this song, some folks have voted for East Coast Swing and Jive but have noted that it’s slow for those dances. That’s not necessarily bad; you could speed up the song a bit (modern technology is fantastic) and get it to something still slow for ECS but not crazy slow – which might be just the right tempo for a first dance.

But what if you can’t find the song in the music4dance catalog? There is another tool that can provide some help. Try looking at the tempo counter tool (and its help page). Counting out the song’s tempo in this tool will show you which dances can technically be danced to the song. The tempo counter result doesn’t tell you anything about if the style of the song fits the dance. But this is also pretty interesting because if you’re going to go all the way and choreograph a first dance, sometimes doing something that’s a little out of a stylistic mismatch can be pretty effective. Choreographing a dance to a song that doesn’t quite fit is frequently done with showcase dances like those you see on Dancing with the Stars and can be very effective in creating a memorable wedding dance.

I hope this helped and that you really enjoy your first dance, not to mention the rest of your wedding and reception.

If you used the second method I mentioned or the help of a professional to find a song/dance combination for any of your wedding dances, please consider becoming part of the music4dance community and adding your wedding songs to the catalog.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. This is a reboot of a very early blog post I wrote in 2015. Since the site has been through a couple of significant over-hauls since I wrote the first pair of wedding music posts, I think it’s worthwhile revisiting them. I may end up doing a more systematic rewrite. In that case, I’ll try to figure out a better way to index the posts to remove duplicates and/or make the fresher content pop up ahead of the old content.

Searching for Music

New Dance: Single Swing

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I’ve added Single Swing as a dance style that can be searched on and voted for in the music4dance catalog. While I think of this dance as a short-cut to use when I want to dance East Coast Swing to faster Jive or Lindy-Hop music, I’ve received enough feedback from the community that it’s considered a unique dance in its own right that I am happy to add it. From some light searching on this dance, it has gone by several names in different regions and times. Some of the names I saw were “Sing-time Swing,” “Single rhythm swing,” and “East Coast Single Swing.” It’s also one of several dances that have been called the Jitterbug at some point in the twentieth century.

I set the initial tempo to 140-184 beats per minute (35-46 measures per minute), which I found listed in several places. Since, as far as I can tell, this isn’t a competition dance, I haven’t found an “official” tempo range and am happy to adjust if someone with more expertise in this particular dance would provide feedback. I also seeded this list of songs with publicly available lists that sounded reasonable. Please feel free to go through to vote up other swing songs that you think are good fits for this dance. You can do this by adding songs or by searching for Swing songs in the Single Swing tempo range and voting up the ones that sound like good Single Swings. I’m also happy to bulk upload lists if you’ve got a CSV file or Spotify playlist of single swings that you’d like me to include.

Over the past several years, I’ve been moving the site in a direction where I hope to be able to handle more different dance styles and add them more easily. I’m getting closer to being able to add dances quickly. However, to add a lot of different dances, I’ll have to replace the underlying search engine (or wait for it to add some new features – it will be interesting to see which comes first). Some of the things I’ve done are to make lists of dances somewhat flatter and allowing search by name in most places where dances are listed. I’ve loosened the tie between types of dances (e.g., Sing, Waltz, Latin) and dance style, so that dance styles don’t have to be as strictly categorized as before. I’ve also added synonyms to dance styles, so in most places where you see the name of a dance style, other names of the dance are shown in parenthesis.

In any case, I’m always interested in what you think would be most helpful. I’m sure there are plenty of dance styles I’m not cataloging that fit into the broad category of partner dances that are danced to a specific tempo range or style of music. If you have a dance style suggestion or other comments, please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider helping by adding to the Single Swing catalog or contributing in whatever other way makes sense for you.

Reviews

Book Review: Swingin’ at the Savoy: The Memoir of a Jazz Dancer

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Swingin’ at the Savoy is a beautiful memoir of one of the greatest Lindy Hop dancers of all time. Ms. Miller was not only one of the dancers that defined Lindy Hop, but as Lindy Hop faded for a while post World War II, she launched a career as a Jazz Dancer.

It’s a real treat to see a slice of history that’s so important to American partner dancing through the eyes of one of its early practitioners. 

I was especially touched by being able to catch a glimpse of what it was like to be a strong woman of color in a male-dominated world. Ms. Miller jumps from the pain of the internal politics of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers to the joy of dancing to Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman to tales of traveling overseas.

There is, unsurprisingly, a good amount of overlap between this memoir and Frankie Manning’s Ambassador of Lindy Hop. Having read them both, I feel like they complement each other and help paint the picture of the early Lindy Hop scene from somewhat different perspectives.

I grew up listening to and playing Big Band Music – Count Basie, Glen Miller, and Duke Ellington were some of my favorites in the genre, and she met and danced to them all live. Even though I built music4dnace.net in part to be able to find songs to dance to that aren’t part of the genre that they evolved with, one of the reasons I was attracted to Swing dancing in the first place is my love for Swing Music.  

Another tidbit in this memoir was the mention of the “Savoy Hostesses” and the fact that you could purchase a dance with one for a quarter. They would even teach you to dance if necessary. This was the first I had seen of historical backing for the core plot line of a fun coming-of-age novel I read a while back called Ten Cents a Dance. Set in a 1940’s Chicago dance hall, the main character is something like what Ms. Miller describes as the Savoy Hostess. Of course, as I write this, I realize I must not have done even a light search on the background when I read the book. There is plenty of information about “Taxi Dancers” and even a song, a film, and another book called “Ten Cents a Dance,” all about dance hostesses or taxi dancers.

Swingin’ at the Savoy also includes a preface and epilogue that give some great context. “Portrait of the Swing Era” has a bunch of great tidbits, including some history of the Jitterbug that I’m hoping to do some more reading on and share with you. And “The Future of the Lindy and The New York Swing Dance Society” puts some perspective on the New York Swing revival.

Overall, Swingin’ the Savoy is an enlightening read about a fantastic woman.

As always, I’m interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.

Swingin' the Savoy by Norma Miller

Swingin’ at the Savoy: Kindle Edition

Swingin’ at the Savoy: Paperback Edition

Swingin’ at the Savoy: Audible

Note: If you found this book through this blog, please be kind and click on one of the links above to purchase it. This helps support the blog. If you’re feeling especially generous (or just like the blog a lot), clicking on the Amazon links in the blog or on the music4dance site and then doing your regular, unrelated shopping, which also helps support the site as a very small fraction of those proceeds will be directed to musci4dance.

About music4dance

Ask music4dance: Should you add a Single Swing Dance category?

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Arne had another great question (paraphrased): I see Single Swing being danced a lot these days.  Should music4dance add another swing category? Is Single Swing a local thing, national, really new? Do people still dance triple-step Swing?

Here is a slightly cleaned-up version of my response:

East Coast Swing (the triple step variety) is a competition dance, so it’s still being danced regularly in ballroom environments. But the Lindy revival of the ’90s seems to have dominated the social swing scene from what I can tell.

In the ballroom community that I learned to dance in during the ’90s, they used the term East Coast Swing to refer to the competition dance, which was definitely a triple-swing. But if one was dancing socially to music too fast to comfortable dance triple swing, you would revert to something they were calling Single Swing or East Coast Single Swing or some variation on that.

I fell down a rabbit hole, trying to see if my recollection had anything to do with current thinking on this. This video shows a “Single Swing” basic that is exactly what I think of as Single Swing. Duet Dance and DanceTime both have descriptions of various kinds of swings. They seem to agree that what I think of as Single Swing could also be reasonably called “The Jitterbug” (which I had thought was just a different name for Lindy Hop). As with any of this stuff, the history is so twisted up that there probably isn’t a correct answer, or if there is, it would require a historian to dig up.

Even without adding a new dance, you should be able to find some good ideas for Single Swings by searching for generic Swing in the tempo range between 140 and 184 MPM. When I first responded to Arne, I had broken that feature, but it’s now up and running again. So you can go to the Advanced Search Page, choose Swing in the dances section, and type in the tempo range you’d like to filter on. 

I am interested in incorporating Single Swing into the music4dance catalog. Should I do this as Jitterbug or Single Swing or by adding single and triple tags to East Coast Swing? I’d love to get others’ thoughts on this so please feel free to send feedback.

Asking to add a new dance style to the catalog is certainly in the top ten questions I’ve been getting. So I’ve been working on streamlining how I manage dance information to make that easier. Most of this work has been under the hood (although the bug mentioned above was one side effect). One of the more visible aspects of this is a small redesign of the Dance Styles page to simplify it a bit and hopefully make it a little more usable.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas you have about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.

Reviews

Dance as Language

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I was delighted to find that the folks at the Rough Translation podcast produced an episode called May We Have This Dance?  For those who haven’t heard of it, Rough Translation describes itself as “a podcast about cultural mistranslation and what we can learn from them.”

In this episode, they explore the Lindy Hop and its odd evolution from a dance created by African Americans in 1920s Harlem to its revival when it was adopted by the Scandinavians (and others) in the 1990s.  Not being from either culture, I don’t feel equipped to talk about the core of the cultural issues addressed in the podcast and accompanying article.  But I would recommend both Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop and Stompin’ at the Savoy if the podcast piques your interest in the origins of the whole swing family of dances.  In addition, I haven’t read Swingin’ the Savoy yet but it is definitely going into my queue.

I will say that I particularly liked the discussion at about 30 minutes into the podcast about when LaTasha and Felix clicked as dance partners and dance became like a conversation.  I feel like the best of my social partner dancing has felt like speaking a language that’s more expressive than English.

Definitely check out the reference material they have at the end – if you haven’t seen the Lindy Hop sequence from Hellzapoppin, you’re in for a real treat and the clip of LaTasha and Felix was lots of fun as well.

Finally – they provided a list of LaTasha’s favorite music to dance to which I added to the music4dance catalog and then exported as a Spotify playlist.

As always, I’m happy for feedback and if you enjoy the site or the blog, please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.

Searching for Music

Ask Music4Dance: How do I find a “Pop Rock” song to dance a Slow Foxtrot to?

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This is another question that I’ve seen a bunch of variations on over the years.  It’s one of the reasons that I started music4dance.  I love Big Band music and grew up playing Basie and Goodman in Jazz bands.  And my dad was a big fan of Buddy Rich.  On top of that Foxtrot and Swing co-evolved with this kind of music, so there is no problem finding plenty of music of that style to dance to.

But I’m also pretty eclectic in my musical tastes and some of the most fun I’ve had as a dancer is choreographing an exhibition dance to music that wasn’t written to be danced to – or at least not a traditional ballroom style dance.  There are obviously limits to this, but you see it all the time on shows like Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance.

When I received a variation on this question again recently, I checked and realized that in my big rewrite of the site, I had broken the easiest way to do this kind of search.  This is now fixed,  so you can go to the info page for the dance style you’re interested in by choosing “Dances” from the Music menu. Pick the dance style you’re interested in (in this case Slow Foxtrot). Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see a tags section.  This is a tag cloud that includes all of the tags (other than dance style tags) that people have associated with songs that someone has also tagged as danceable to Slow Foxtrot.  From there you can explore all the unusual songs and musical styles that someone at some point has attempted to dance the Slow Foxtrot to.

I have to admit, going through some of these, that there are plenty that are a stretch – even with a choreographed set piece.  But still a lot of fun to think about.  If you go down this road and find things that stretch your ability to imagine dancing a particular style to and feel that they’re a mistake rather than a fun (but out there) variation, please feel free to vote them down.  Remember all of this content is crowd-sourced, so you’ve got a vote if you choose to use it.

One thing that I realized as I was writing this is that there isn’t an easy way to go the other direction.  You can use Advanced Search or the main Tag Cloud to list all of the songs associated with any tag.  But that doesn’t give you a direct list of all of the dance styles, you have to scroll through all the songs and figure that out yourself.  Let me know if that would be interesting to you and I’ll increase the priority of that feature. 

And as always I love to hear from you – so please send me feedback about the site or with questions about this post.  I may even feature your question in a future post.

Quick Tip:

If you want to be able to listen to a Spotify Playlist of all of the songs that you find in a search like the one above (or any other search on the site), you can do so by signing up for a premium subscription. I took the liberty of generating a playlist for the example above here in case you want to check it out – while you’re on Spotify, please “like” the music4dance account and any of the other playlists that you enjoy.

About music4dance

How do you like to see lists of music to dance to?

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One of the core features of music4dance is to be able to list songs for dancing in a bunch of different ways.  As I noted a little while ago, I’m at the point in the process of the site upgrade where I’m reworking that core functionality.  In a world of infinite (or even abundant) resources , I’d get the new functionality up and running and give you the opportunity to switch back and forth between the new and the old for some period of time and give me your feedback.  While that’s a bit out of my reach, it occurred to me that it’s pretty easy to just roll out what I’ve got on some of the pages and leave the old stuff in place on others. That will give you the opportunity to see them both and compare and give feedback.

As of this writing (November 15th, 2020) I’ve got an initial version working and rolled out to some of the pages.  You can see the new song lists on  the Holiday Music page including the specific holiday dance variants like Holiday Cha Cha and Holiday Foxtrot, the New Music page and the dance pages including both the dance group pages like the Swing page and specific dance pages like the Rumba page.  The old version is still live in the basic song library and as the results of advanced searches as well as any of the links from other places on the site that bring up a song list.

Please take a look and let me know what you think.  I’m particularly interested in anything that I left out in the new version that you used in the old version.  But I’m also always open to feedback and ideas for what I could do to make this content more helpful for you.

As always, thank you for supporting music4dance and please feel to provide feedback on the subject of this post or anything else relating to music4dance.

Music and Dance

Playing with Dance Tempos

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I just rewrote the Tempo tool for the music4dance site as part of the current effort to update the site.  In the process I went back and revisited the reasons for writing the tool in the first place. 

The main reason for this tool is to have a single place to do a bit of slicing and dicing of the relationship between the tempo of different partner dances.  It allows one to filter on the dances that you’re interested in (all Swing dances, or American Style dances) and sort by tempo to see the relationships.    This could, for instance, help find dances that one might mash up into an exhibition routine.

Another reason is just because I could.  The Tempo tool is really just a thin layer on top of the data that I use to drive the Counter tool and many other parts of the site.  I almost didn’t rewrite the tool because since I originally wrote it I added slightly less interactive but possibly more directly useful pages that lay out the different competition dances and their tempos in what I hope is an easily digestible way.

This is part of a larger rewrite of the site that I’ve been working on to get the code to a place where I can comfortably start adding more requested features.  The Counter and Tempo tools are a couple of the most isolated pages, but I’ll start digging into more core functionality soon.

As always, please send me feedback if you have ideas about the site, dancing, music, or how any or all of those subjects relate. And please consider supporting the music4dance project by sharing with your friends or any of the other ways listed here.

Quick Tip:  Many pages (like the ones mentioned above) have documentation pages that are easily accessible from the page.  Just go to the “Info” menu and choose “Help”, this will generally take you to a documentation page specifically about the feature that you were using.

Archive

Where did all the Collegiate Shag music go?

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When I first started publishing lists of swing music on the music4dance site, I grouped all of the swing style dances together and then used tempo ranges to guess at specific dance styles.  This method works reasonably well for some of the core swing dances such as Lindy Hop, East Coast Swing, and Jive.

But a helpful Carolina Shag DJ contacted me to let me know that this method did not work at all for Carolina Shag since the dance ancestor might be swing, but the music that one typically dances to doesn’t even have a swing rhythm.  And of course, both Hustle and West Coast Swing are very much part of the swing family of dances but don’t require a swing rhythm to dance to.  So I went back and made the default searches only return songs that someone had explicitly tagged as a type of swing rather than inferring anything from general category and tempo.

Since the only exposure I had to Collegiate Shag was a reference that it was a swing style dance to music between 180-200 beats per minute when I turned off the “infer by tempo” feature,  I stopped listing any Collegiate Shag songs.  Well, that seemed wrong, so I did some digging around the web and found a few lists of Collegiate Shag songs and incorporated them into the music4dance catalog.

Do you dance or DJ Collegiate Shag?  Please, let me know if there are other songs that I should add to this list.

Reviews

Feel the Beat

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If you want to be able to enjoy partner dancing and look good while doing it, you have to be able to dance to the music.  A lot of what I’ve been working on with the music4dance project is solving the problem of finding music that works for particular styles of dance.  But for many beginning dancers, the first questions is more fundamental – you need to be able to hear the rhythm in the music so that you can match your dance steps to it.

There are probably as many ways to do that as there are dancers.  But as far as I can tell there are two major schools.  Those dancers that have a musical background and those that don’t.  I’m definitely in the second category, but the first category is critical.  You don’t have to know how to play music or have in-depth knowledge of music theory to be able to dance.

So for those of you who don’t have a musical background and are working on dancing to the music, I would highly recommend James Joseph’s Every Man’s Survival Guide to Ballroom Dancing: Ace Your Wedding Dance and Keep Cool on a Cruise, at a Formal, and in Dance Classes.  The entire first section is devoted to “feeling the beat.” He does a great job of building up a system for learning how to find the beat and phrase.  He also spends some time on talking about the breadth of systems that dance teachers use to do a verbal count which is really useful because this can confuse the heck out of a new learner whether they have a musical background or not.  Joseph also talks a lot about hearing the eights – which I found apropos of one of my recent posts.

The biggest downside to the system that he’s teaching is that it really glosses over the idea of swing rhythm, which is particularly ironic since it’s based on Skippy Blair’s system and has its roots in the swing dance world.  To be fair, though, I suspect this gets down to the idea of feeling the music vs. being able to put it down in musical notation – the early swing musicians just started adding a swing accent to their music, they didn’t figure out how it fit into a classical notation system until later.

I’m continuing to search for either a website or a book that does a good job of showing the musical notation and instrumentation for a wide variety various kinds of partner dances.  I’ve found a few sites  that will go into a single dance and a pretty stale site with many broken links that does a better overview.  But nothing comprehensive in sight yet.  Please share if you have good resources on this subject, I’d love to get a good reference section going here.