Caro Emerald- the Andrew Sisters meets Hip Hop

Caro Emerald is a Dutch pop and jazz singer. She has been identified with the electro swing scene in  Europe although her range is wider and her music has a more classic feel. She first appeared on the music scene with her sing "Back It Up" in 2009.

On her Facebook page, she describes her music  as "Lyrical tales of romance and deception over a blend of Samba, jazz, bossa nova, mambo and crackling vinyl. A mix of 1950's inspired ballroom jazz, cinematic tangoes, groovin' jazz tracks, infectious mambo's and banging beats."

Here is a link to her bio.

Here is a link to her video of "Back It Up"

Caro's entire catalog of music is meant to be danced and those who have come to our dances have heard many of these songs. Here is a list of some my favorites.

If you are a Spotify member. Here is a playlist of her music.

Hugh Laurie, " Let Them Talk": Blues for dancing

A blues record by an English comedic actor?  In his own words “ Let this record show that I am a white, middle-class Englishman, openly trespassing on the music and myth of the American south.” 

After passing over it a couple times in iTunes, I spent some time listening to it and was pleasantly surprised. It is a great tribute to the New Orleans tradition of blues and includes covers of 15 standards. A large part of the success of the album can be attributed to producer, Joe Henry and an excellent band that includes such legendary artists such as Dr John, Irma Thomas and Tom Jones with horn arrangements by Allen Toussaint. Hugh Laurie does vocals and plays piano and guitar. His voice is a little thin on the vocals, yet he has a kind of an English actor's phrasing that gives the songs an “eclectic” flavor and makes you listen to the lyrics from a different perspective. I like that.

And it has some great songs for dancing.

 “Let Them Walk” is a blues waltz that has crossover possibilities. Its one of those waltzes where the tempo (150 bpm) does not match the energy of the song. (In a traditional rotary or Viennese style waltz, the tempo and energy mesh and invite a smooth, flowing style of dancing.) Because of this tension it offers other possibilities of using a variety of rhythms to dance to the emotion in the music. 

Other songs that invite dancing include:

“Battle of Jericho” -  A spiritual that is rousing two step. I love the arrangement on this one.

“St. James Infirmary”  -  The second half is a great blues/ west coast.

“Buddy Bolden’s Blues” and “Six Cold Feet” works nicely as slow blues.

Dancers will be hearing these songs at our dances. Let me know which ones you like. 

Check out the rest of the songs on Amazon:

 Let Them Talk

FM to Spotify- the search for dance music

This has got be the golden age of the musical search. There are so many ways to find new music from small groups or distant cultures.

Over the last 15+ years of DJing for first zydeco/swing dances and then for waltz eclectic, the search for music has been one of my most enjoyable past times. Its something like the stamp collecting I did as a kid, finding the rare piece of music from some exotic culture to which you can actually dance. But when going back and pondering the changes that have occurred in my way of searching for music I am just amazed. No longer does one have to buy numerous CD’s or stick to the tried and true repertoire.

Here’s a timeline of how finding music and DJing as changed over the period.

1996 to 2000:  I would hear a song at dance and find the name of the song and “try” to remember it. Record stores like “Hear music” had booths where you could listen to music with headphones which make even mediocre music dance in your head.  So many CDs were bought this way and then rarely listened to again. Then there were FM radio stations, Rolling Stone’s and other magazines’ music reviews. However, while there were more sources for finding music , it was hit and miss with the music coming through cultural and commercial filters.

2000 to 2004: Then there was Google. The Internet opened up the world of music. Typing a few words in a box allowed one to find music from little known artists, to see what DJs from the East coast or Europe where playing and maybe even hear a 20 second snippet of a song. This explosion of accessibility to different music is what allows me to really be “eclectic” in my playlists.

2005 to 2010: Along came iTunes and YouTube.  Typing words in a box was easy but one still needed to find the words. With iTunes finding music became a purely surfing activity allowing me to ride a rhythm of clicks from one artist to the next, listening to samples of music and discovering artists I had never heard of. With YouTube, one could search for dancers and actually hear what they were dancing to. The music discovered through these venues was available to buy with additional advantage of being able to buy just the songs off a CD that were of interest.

The present:  Music from all around the world is now available to everyone and the unique character of that music has not yet fused into a world blend like a MacDonald’s restaurant but still represents the indigenous values and visions of local cultures.  In addition, Itunes and YouTube have been improved and they have a lot of competition. You can now listen to a whole or at least most of a song before you buy it instead of just a sample.

At present my preferred sources for music are:
1. First and foremost, suggestions from dancers in our community. Keep them coming.
2. I still use Google to search forums, artists and other DJ playlists.
3. Online music distributors. I use iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Calabash (for world music) and Spotify.

My current favorite is Spotify. It’s a music streaming service that was developed in Europe and therefore has a strong representation of European and world music. It allows for the creation of playlists that can be streamed through your computer consisting of any music that is on their service. This means I can listen to whole songs numerous times before I decide to buy that song (elsewhere) and play it at a dance. Playlists can also be published that other subscribers can listen to. If anyone would like to subscribe to my playlists and hear music I am evaluating for possible play at a coming dance. I would like to get your feedback. Subscriptions range from free (you need to be invited) to $5 or $10/mo for paid subscriptions. If you would like an invitation, email me.  I only have a few left, so first emails get them.

Lastly I would like to thank the community of dancers who come to our events for allowing me to turn an activity that could easily be seen as a collector’s addiction, into a craft where the end product is the vision of dancers participating in the joy of music.

Dancing as a Language

Music is a language. To those who are not fluet in this music, the conversations are of the musician are magical expressions of feeling and dream like images that amaze us. Like a spoken language, music as a lnaguage consists of a vocabulary and grammar that is internalized to an extent that it becomes a second nature. The language becomes like an ocean that musicians are fully immersed in and give no thought to as they move through their currents of musical expression.

Dancing is in many respects a dialect of this musical language that speaks to and converses with the bodies of those who understand its form. There is a vocabulary of steps that relate to there musical counterparts. In its simplest level it consists of:

1. a one step that steps on each beat.

2. a two step that changes weight twice on each beat

3. triplets that have three steps per every two beats i.e. one and two

4. hestitions movements that rests with the music.

The grammar of a dancing language in its simplest form is how these steps are related to the phasing in the musics. Which parts of the steps are accented. How the steps are combined into rhtyhms that move and stop with the phasing in the music.

The dialect of the language relates to where in the body the movement starts from, how the music moves the body, what part of body does the music move. The dialect is the style of the dance, the look it outw

A Personal Prospective on DJing

All DJs no matter what genre of dancers they are relating to have a perosnal bias that they bring to the DJing. I have thought a lot about what my own peronsal bias is. My start in DJing came basically from playing music I liked to dance to and as my dancing evolved the music I selected changed. Of course to call oneself a DJ the choice of music must respond to the character and skills of the dancers for are DJing for. So the question that I needed to ask and find answers for is what is it in music that makes people what to dance.

The short (cryptic) answer:

Music is condensed passion.
Dancing is feeling that passion and allowing it to be expressed through one's body and their connection with their partners.

So with this bias, what I look for primarily in music is the emotion it expresses. Next how acessible it is to hear that passion in one’s body and then what is the character of the dance that flow out of the passion contained in the music.

There are all kinds of passion expressed in music. Waltz alone contain a kalipscope of passions. The simple, longing feeling of a country waltz, the communal strands and rhythms of a folk, the flowing, erobic tempos of viennese waltes, the passion, angst with joy, energy with reflection of tango vals, the flowing, smooth seductive character lyrical waltzes with melodies sung from a longing soul. Good waltzes are delightful combinations of rhythms and melodies, movement and feeling, that reflect a whole culture or moment of an individual’s life but can be felt and danced by us all.

In other entries I will attempt to explore the feelings contained in other dances: swing, latin dances, tango etc

Another bias, no matter what the passion is, whether is it is dark, comtemplative, longing, joyfull, opening, assertive, seductive, playful, ..... the expression of that passion (feeling) through dance can leave one in a heightened state, more open more engaged, more connected. The key is recognizing the passion and committing oneself to expressing that passion- playfully, openly and with a contineously flowing connection to ones partner.

These are two perspectives through which I DJ, there are others. Stay tuned.