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I know that (not the term "cut time" though) but my point is that dancers and listeners in general only care how it sounds.
How it is made to sound that way, or how it has to be written such that it can be made to sound that way, that's the players' turf (and I suppose one could argue that the entire written aspect is moot in purely improvised music).
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07-17-2024 09:39 AM
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I guess in that case they wouldn’t care if it were written in 7/16, as long as it sounds the same. But it’s a bit like saying you don’t care much about oxygen so long as you can breathe.
Originally Posted by RJVB
Sure, casual dancers don’t much care about the practical technical aspects of making music (professionals sure do), but they care about the result and the behind the scenes stuff impacts the result.
And sure … written time signature doesn’t matter in improvised music because the music isn’t written, but the way the music is felt matters and the time signature should reflect the feel.
(And cut time is 2/2 time)
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Usually two guitars, upright, and a melody instrument preferably violin or clarinet. Drums, upright, and piano can work too. The gigs I get usually don't pay enough to warrant more than that lol. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
This is a good book to pull tunes from: https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/...jango_2008.pdf
I like it because most of the melodies are bare bones so they're easy to read, if necessary, and leave room for artistic interpretation. Some of the charts are not quite accurate but most are pretty good and they're all good enough to get through on a gig without any mishaps.
This book has some good stuff too: https://djangobooks.com/forum/upload...SNM0KUVKYZ.pdf
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Thanks a bunch!! Originally Posted by olejason
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Since I am unburdened by the ability to read standard notation--and particularly blind to how time/pulse/feel is represented there--I go entirely by ear and whatever it is that tells me that a tune is danceable. And I suspect that even competent sight-readers depend on "feel" to fine-tune how they play for dancers or as accompanists for singers.
I haven't done a great deal of dancing since my courting days (and today is our 54th anniversary), but I can tell instantly when a tune is danceable--because it makes me want to dance. It's very like the sensation of backing a really good soloist after one whose groove is obscure--like the feeling of hitting a stretch of new pavement on the highway: suddenly smooth. I'm not sure how accurately notation can represent that degree of musicality, but I'm pretty sure that it can be acquired on the bandstand. (And I've watched highly proficient player-teachers try to get rhythm players to swing--it's an art and a craft and really hard to pin down outside a real-time ears-to-hands environment.)
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It's so weird when people brag about ignorance. Originally Posted by RLetson
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I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’s being tongue-in-cheek. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
Still, I guess a bit of an odd start to an assertion about the usefulness of notation in describing time-feel.
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And I guess to that point … of course no notation represents the sound it’s supposed to make with 100% accuracy, but time-signature does tend to convey information about how the pulse is felt.
We emphasize two eighth notes differently than two quarter notes at double time, etc etc.
I just had a lesson yesterday with a guy who was having trouble playing in 6/8 and he was trying to play double time but placing emphasis on the first of every *three* sixteenths. And it was weird and difficult and he didn’t know why and his time was all over the place. So we talked about how to start implying the time without playing every subdivision and how to play faster while honoring the time.
Ive told this story before but I had a student who kept his audio in headphones and I asked him to play eighth notes at 100 and then asked him to play sixteenths at 50 and he pretended to change the metronome but didn’t. I couldn’t hear the click but I absolutely caught him and called him. These things matter, even if it’s only a matter of training and habit etc. How we conceive of the time has serious implications for how we play.
More interesting would be how to convey different dances in the *same* time signature, which would be some odd combination of verbal instructions or accents or something.
More likely — people just know and place the emphasis where it belongs.
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Sorry if the light-irony tone didn't come across in my post, but I am in fact not able to get anything more than the most basic notion of time-feel and phrasing from a score. (And it's not for lack of trying for the last 65 years.) Instead, when I look at, say, a Real Book chart, I can often recognize what I'm hearing in what I see in the notation. But I acquire new tunes by ear, aided by chord information from a chart. That's not a brag--just the way things are for me. Nevertheless, I do usually manage to swing.
And I really have watched teachers work with experienced sight-readers to get them to swing. I want to say there's something akin to the problem of quantization in electronic music that aspires to mimic human playing--how much granularity does a representational system need to accurately present what happens in actual performance? My strong suspicion is that playing for dancers is a lot like dancing itself. I've watched a lot of dancers, and I wonder how much of what is in the body can be captured by choreographic notation.
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Eh? Neither am I Originally Posted by RJVB
I have literally no idea what you are on about tbhI'll hear notes and a pulse. As long as I'm not also seeing the score I don't care how many flags the notes have that I hear on each pulse.
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Hard swinging the rhythm worked pretty well for the gig. We had people dancing near the end of the night to How High The Moon and Four. First time people have danced while we played.
Is it bad form to say I think I'm getting better at this?
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You're out there doing it-- I guarantee you're getting better at it. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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Nothing inspires practice like an upcoming gig. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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Yeah just to reaffirm, this is something I think you really develop on the gig. And spontaneous dancing is always a good sign!
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I wanna second that! Originally Posted by Christian Miller
@Allan: I think you Sound great, and that motivation that comes through in your posts is key!
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Thanks, that means a lot coming from you. Originally Posted by Webby
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Just because this might be interesting:
Here are some of the slightly unusual tunes, that have been working out great at the lindyhop events we play:
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I think Blow Big Jay is the best song on your album. I always play it twice.
Woah, that Roy Montrell song is rocking!
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Nice to have some Snakehips in there.
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Thank you! Blow Big Jay was actually a recommendation by some dancers! Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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I must've felt my ears ringing...
I've got 22 years experience bandleading specifically for modern day Lindy Hop and Balboa dancers at top events all over the world, usually with either a 7pc band (my "Campus Five") or my big band (the "Jonathan Stout Orchestra"). In the last couple years, I've added a trio/quartet to my portfolio of bands in an effort to have something that puts my guitar playing front-and-center, and is something to sell to jazz and concert venues that don't have/want dancing. Of course, I end up doing the trio/quartet for dancers anyway.
General stuff:
- high level modern swing dancing is a very specific culture, where 50 years of mostly being DJ'd to has led to very specific distributions of tempos expected, as well as a general expectation of songs that the length of a 78rpm record. For better or worse, (and I came from that, so I didn't realize how different it is until much later) DJ's have cherry-picked tunes for so long that a totally distinct pattern of tempos are expected for a social dance that have little to do with the sets played by bands during the 30's-40's. In higher level scenes, people just specialize in doing the various swing dances (mostly lindy hop, with some balboa, charleston or shag, depending), and don't really ever foxtrot or do other various ballroom dances, and often hyper interest on swing-era music (though some places tend to have infatuations with slightly earlier or later jazz in waves). In lower level scenes you may find less knowledge and specialization, so people do a broader spectrum of dances, and have less specific taste in music.
- while there is often a global consensus in taste on music, because scenes are spread out all over the world, with some being large, experienced and very well developed (like, say, Los Angeles), some are very new, inexperienced and still developing (like some of the smaller local scenes around Europe). Older, better scenes are really burned out on the superficial, overplayed, obvious - so, very little Glenn Miller, no "In the Mood", very little Rat Pack. Very green scenes are chock-full of swing-era-adjacent non-swing music because they don't know better yet. And then some scenes will have very specific divergences from normal tempo distributions if they have large number of people who specialize in the other swing dance forms outside of Lindy Hop, like Balboa, Charleston, Shag, or Blues. Balboa, Charleston, and Shag are all typically done to music with a faster average distribution and higher floor because they don't have any 8th notes in the their steps - social balboa doesn't really work great at under 170bpm. Blues is the opposite. All of this means that while there are "rules" about what works generally globally and especially at large events, any scene can be quite a bit different.
I have a bunch more to add, much of it specially about the challenge of trying to make music as dynamic and varied as a big band is capable of with just three or four people.
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Johnathan - thanks for the detailed run-down on the different scenes and their musical predilictions, something that someone with your experience traveling the world can see. I am living in Europe, and would be interested to know what locales here you see as having a swing dance scene?
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This is all very interesting and I had heard you say on a podcast that the Swing Dance scene is primarily a DJ scene. There is a theater south of Chicago that has weekly social dancing and they trade nights with live bands and DJs. Originally Posted by campusfive
I saw on your website you're playing a competition in Chicago next month, unfortunately I have gigs both nights or I would come see you play.
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Jonathan--Do you encounter dance situations that are more old-fashioned-social than the organized dance culture? When I started attending Swing Week at Augusta* in 1996, I got to witness two kinds of dancers: the swing-dance club contingent (who showed up with their dancing duds and clearly were working on their dance chops) and the (sometimes a bit older) campers who were recreating the courting-ritual and social-mixing activities of their youths. (I was in that latter group.) Once the swing-dance craze quieted down a bit, the dancing tended to be less technical, though there were dance instructors every year to introduce campers to historical and stylistic distinctions.
One of the lessons I recall from the instrumental teachers was the distinction between jazz blowing and dance sets: keep each tune down to four minutes or so, because dancers can get tired and because they might want to change partners or styles. I also noted the distribution of tempos--maybe three uptempo numbers for every foxtrot, and the occasional waltz, especially on western-swing/honkytonk nights, when there would also be a dash of two-steps.
* The Augusta Heritage Center's song/dance/folklife program at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, WV. The Swing Week is no more at Augusta, though its older cousin persists at Ashokan.
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The modern Lindy Hop swing-scenes I reference are generally the kind that literally NEVER have a waltz. So, the phenomena you observed may be distinct to that branch of the subculture that does. Originally Posted by RLetson
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