DANCE WITH ME
Emerging from a 50 year hiatus, "Swing" is again king, and the joints are jumpin' on the west coast's scene in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and they are hopping in New York.
There's even a little rivalry showing. East Coast Swing is more of a purer, faster, real Savoy Ballroom type of swing, while the West Coast Swing Style is a sultrier, slower variation of the Savoy Lindy Hop. The East Coast Swingers find West Coast overly sexual, while West Coast aficionados find New York's traditional Lindy as too wild.
In New York, Wall Street traders, College students, and almost everyone else have been flocking to the Swing clubs. It's not a 'Lounge culture', a martini sipping scene, this is about dancing, about touching your partner.
To the current generation, weaned on dancing to a volume so pumped up that all conversation is shut out; and with partners kept at arms's length, the social aspects of swing's upbeat, infectious rhythm and casual physical contact have proved particularly appealing. Many of today's new Swingsters bored with the old formless, free-style dancing of techno and hip-hop clubs like being able to grab on to their real live partners.
Excerpts from..The Big Band Data Base
...But before Swing, there was the Blues...and the great piano rendition "Albert Ammons Blues" playing now lasts for 3 minutes and 50 seconds and is well worth the time to listen to the whole piece.
The blues grew out of African spirituals and worksongs. In the late 1800s, southern African-Americans passed the songs down orally, and they collided with American folk and country from the Appalachians. New hybrids appeared by each region, but all of the recorded blues from the early 1900s are distinguished by simple, rural acoustic guitars and pianos.
After World War II, the blues began to fragment, with some musicians holding on to acoustic traditions and others taking it to jazzier territory.
However, most bluesmen followed Muddy Waters' lead and played the blues on electric instruments. From that point on, the blues continued to develop in new directions -- particularly on electric instruments -- or it has been preserved as an acoustic tradition.
Information obtained from The All Music Guide.
If you would like to listen to more great Blues music, visit... Gary's Midi Madness
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