Hey Jazz Lovers, Lindy Hoppers and Swing DJs,

I recently have been getting several questions about how to build a Jazz Collection, so I’m starting a series of blog posts that will tackle the subject. This is a lifelong journey that you are about to embark on. Let’s start!

Let me begin by quantifying the ways in which you can grow your collection.

• Breadth – This is the number of artists that you have in your collection.
• Depth – This is the number of songs per artist that you have in your collection.

If you are a complete beginner then your focus should be on breadth. Once you gain some breadth you can switch your focus to depth.

How to Expand the Breadth of Your Collection:

• Ask your local DJ for information.
  • When your local DJ plays a song that you like, go up and ask them for the artist and song title.

• Music Suggestion Tools
  • These are services that take a song or artist and play similar songs. Take a song or artist that you know you like, input it into the service, and let them do the rest. Many of these are radio services where you can hear whole songs for free. Here are a couple for you to check out:
    • Grooveshark – Internet Radio
    • Pandora – Internet Radio
    • Last.fm – Internet Radio
    • All Music – Similar songs/artist tool
    • TasteKid – Similar songs/artist tool
    • eMusic – Similar songs/artist tool
    • iTunes Music Store – iLike.com Plugin
• Jazz Standards
  • Many Jazz musicians play their own versions of classic Jazz standards. You could easily find 50 versions of “Honeysuckle Rose” by 50 different artists. This is a great route to take to increase the breadth of your collection. Take a standard and search for the title on any of the services listed above (I like Grooveshark). Then look at all of the artists that also play that song to find new artists that you may like.
• So far, these options will help develop your collection with music that YOU like. If you want a faster way to get music, you can check out favorite artist and song lists from swing DJs.
  • This Series of Blog Posts! – There will be several more “Building a Jazz Collection 101″ posts about groups of specific artists. Stay tuned!
  • Philly Lindy Hop – Music for Beginners
  • Lindy Groove DJ Music List
  • Mike Thibault – A Great Jazz Collection For Less Than $100

How to Expand the Depth of Your Collection:

Now that you have gotten a decent number of artists in your collection, you can work on getting more songs by each artist. There are several ways to do this:

• Listen to Whole Albums
  • In the previous steps you found songs that you like. Find the album that these songs came form and listen to the whole thing. This will introduce you to songs that you have not heard from the same artist.
• Find Discographies
  • A Discography is a list of every album that an artist has released. Wikipedia is a good place to find this as well as relevant information about the artist. From here you can listen to an artist’s music in chronological order or in its entirety if you feel so inclined.
• Grooveshark
  • Grooveshark is one tool that allows you to select any song you want. It is more like your ipod and less like a radio. A quick search for an artist’s name will give you a page of results. Just click play all and you’re good to go.

Identifying Artists and Songs:

As you listen, more and more you will start to recognize artists and song melodies. This makes things much easier. You will start to know songs at dances and be able to find similar artists yourself. This also helps if you are looking to DJ someday. One thing that I like to do is play a music game:

• The Artist Guessing Game
  • I like Pandora for this game. Choose a specific niche and try to guess the artists that come on to your station. The best thing to start with is female vocalists, then try male vocalists. Moving on to instrumentals is the final step and the biggest challenge.

So, you’ve got your work cut out for you. If you get stuck, leave a comment and we’ll get through it together. Also, keep us updated with how your jazz collection is turning out!

Until next time,

Graham

We’re back with another addition of Time to Youtube. Our focus today is on another member of the Silver Shadows, but this time a lead. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Peter Strom is pretty great. There, I said it. Let it be written.

Here’s what I like about this guy: 1. Everything he does looks clear and deliberate without being too clean (read: le boring). 2. His sense of humor shows through his dancing, ALL THE TIME. Since I happen to give a high priority to fun and silliness (dancing is fun, no?), I always enjoy watching him dance.

1. Lesson review from Uptown Swing in Minneapolis.

FYI, this month at LaB, the 9pm practice session is focused on learning from Youtube videos. So fun! This is the video we started with.

2. Dancing with Nina Gilkenson (also see here) at Lindy on the Rocks, 2009.

3. Dancing with Laura Glaess at ILHC, 2010.

BONUS FUN TIME: Today’s bonus fun time comes to you from Texas. The Lone Star Championships to be exact.

2010:

2011:

On that note, have a great day y’all! I hope to see you out dancing tonight!

On Saturday we worked on drills at different tempos. You asked for songs to practice to, so here you go – speeds galore.

For a reminder of the triple step drills we did, click here.

As always, feel free to send me any questions you have! Happy Practicing!

Learning to dance can be a tough thing. I know it. And I’m not just talking about the steps.

True Story: I am a shy person in real life and was terrified of asking people to dance for a long time. Really, it was a majorly lame, ridiculously epic period of time. I was certain that I was wasting people’s time and potential to have great dances; somehow I knew that everyone else was a pro and they were all in the pro-dancer club. I was no pro. I was a plague of tangled left feet and a destroyer (the bad kind) of dance floors. The ultimate dance-buzz kill. For a while, I couldn’t even quite imagine that it would ever get better. It felt like everybody else was in on some secret. I was very clearly a muggle in a room full of wizards.

Well folks, it turns out the only plague I had was silliness. I fell pray to some fairly common beginner myths. Read on and see if you also have the silliness plague. Don’t worry, it’s curable.

These are four of the most common beginner myths and their explanations.

1. No one wants to dance with me because I’m no good.

Pish posh. Technique and dance knowledge/experience are not prerequisites to fun. Fun is about enjoying a human connection. Sure, it can be achieved through discourse that uses technique and shared experience and culture, but it can also be achieved through the use of simple things like smiles and openness and good ‘ole, genuine attempts (and subsequent mess ups). Experienced dancers aren’t robots; I promise 99.9% of them still like smiling and laughing, even with those who are just starting out. By the by, most people come out social dancing to socialize and have fun and learn something new. They aren’t there to snicker and judge and give out dancing dunce caps.

2. Clearly everyone else here (a) Knows each other already and (b) Has been dancing since fetus-hood.

(a) Most of them met at a dance or in a dance class. Do you know what that means? It means they were all you, just a little while ago. They were you, and somehow they found other yous, who felt just like you, and became friends. Please note, at any given dance, there are probably jillions of you standing right next to you, just sayin.  (b) Most* people at our weekly dances in Philadelphia have been dancing a few months. The instructors, and a solid group of community members have been dancing a few years. There is only a very small population of people who were ‘dancers’ before they started swing dancing, many were other things like athletes or engineers. *Note. I have not done a study, I understand and enjoy employing the vagueness of the word most.

3. I am boring to dance with; I don’t know enough moves.

I know this is a tough subject leads; do me the favor of hearing me out. Moves are not the end. They are not the best thing since sliced bread. Believe it or not, the best part about this dance is that it feels good to do. That said, moves are an important component. They are fun and often challenging and make you feel fluent. Think of the dance as a language (shout out to Nirav Sanghani, who I’m fairly certain I’ve stolen this analogy from). Moves are the words, your vocabulary. Technique is the grammar. Words fall far short of useful if you don’t know how to string them together. You can shout all the best, really complicated ones all day long, and go ahead. But without some kind of grammar, you’ll only seem crazy.

Be happy with your progress, whatever it is. You’ll collect more rules and words if you want to, that can’t be stopped. It happens over time though. For today, if you only know 3 sentences, say those sentences with pride! No need to wait until you’re fluent to enjoy what you’re doing.

Total immersion, baby.

4. There are unspoken rules in play here. The dance floor is partitioned, and it goes like this: good dancers (possibly snooty), decent dancers, beginners, smellys.

This is not a high school lunch room. This is also not the Titanic. No one (that I know of) forms friendships based on mutual disdain for any dancer at a different experience level. This is just dancing and it’s fun. We are all united in the mission to have a great time. I’m not saying that no one will ever decline a dance with you, or that there aren’t some people who can be rude. What I’m saying is that if you don’t take it too seriously, and you give everyone a fair shot (including those more experienced) at being awesome, then you have a pretty good recipe for success.

I’ve always found it helpful to take notes after a class and to jot down my thoughts and experiences after an event. Having a record to go back to increases my retention, and helps me maintain my dance goals and remember questions. I highly recommend the practice to any dancer, but especially to those of you who are starting out. Here’s a new resource to help:

Lindy Log!

It’s an online dance journal where you can track your dance days and make entries full of all your new moves, thoughts, and questions. It’s great. Check out the demo video on their site to see it in action. I started mine today.

Ah, good ‘ole Youtube.

The tube is a great resource. Be careful though. Its use, although enlightening, has this terribly interesting side-effect of fueling your obsession.

That said, in class last Saturday we talked about footwork variations and I mentioned Nina Gilkenson. She is a particularly inspiring dancer and instructor based out of Baltimore, MD. I promised I’d put up some videos and here they are, just for you.

1. Dancing with Carl Nelson at ALHC, 2007.

*Side Note/Random Factoid: This was the first dance event I ever travelled to AND the first youtube video I ever fell in love with. It is quite dear to me. Please enjoy!

2. Dancing with Andy Reid at Lindyfest, 2007.

*Side Note/Homework: Hunt around and check out all they other Instructor Jams from this event. They’re worth it.

3. Dancing with Mike Faltesek at Lindy Focus, 2008.

*Side Note: A. Mike Faltesek was just in town a few weeks ago and taught a wonderful workshop. Hooray! B. There are a ton of Philadelphia dancers planning to go to Lindy Focus this year. I recommend checking it out, and I’m happy to answer any questions you may have about the event or traveling for dance in general.

Here are some music suggestions to get you started. I posted these on the facebook a while back, but I want all resources to be here and easily searchable, so I’m dusting them off once again.

These are albums that I think are particularly good for starting out. They’re full of moderately tempo-ed songs to practice with:

1. Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington – The Great Summit: The Master Takes

2. Ella Fitzgerald & Count Basie – Ella & Basie

3. Louis Armstrong & Oscar Peterson – Louis Armstrong Meets Oscar Peterson

Also! Take a peek at this blog post by Rochester dancer and awesome DJ, Mike Thibault. He has put together a recommendation list on how to get a jazz collection together for under $100. This is the place to start if you feel daunted by the prospect of learning about a new genre of music or even if you’re worried about spending lots of money.

Please comment if you’d like more suggestions OR if you’ve got some suggestions of your own.

For those of you full of input, I want to hear it! Give me your thoughts, and these in particular:

1. Best beginner friendly music.

2. Your favorite (du jour) jazz musician/group.

Reminder: sharing is caring.

I highly recommend Dax Hock‘s triple step drill sequence.

Here’s my recipe:

First, breathe. This will be fun. Relax and work to get the pattern down. Slowly, ramp up the tempo. THEN, mix and match the pieces. One day, do it all while crossing behind instead of in front.  Voila!

1. Here’s Dax doing the exercise and some other great solo work:

2. Also, check out Joe Demers doing the same exercise. He does it nice and slow so you can pull it apart.

3. Bonus Partnered Drills! WARNING: THIS VIDEO IS AMAZING.

This is a workshop recap from Dax and Alice Mei. Their partnering is out of this world. Watch it and be impressed. When you come to, don’t panic. It has happened to the best of us.

Hey Philly Lindy Hoppers,

We’re so excited to introduce this blog to our website. This is the place where we’ll post videos, tips, pictures and more, all of it aimed at helping you connect to the community and become a better Lindy Hopper.

Thanks for being involved!

Remember, if you have any questions, feel free to email us at info@phillylindyhop.com.