Swinging Projects for Lindy Hop & Balboa Dancers
O n e H u n d r e d ! Wow! I never thought I will write 100 Song of the Week posts, and there is still no end of the series in sight! What song should be posted as the 100th song? I decided to feature a song what had made history. So, it’s not about dancing today, it’s about the first Jazz song ever recorded. Unfortunately, I have to say, the first Jazz recording was not by a black artist, it was by a white group. A black musician had the chance to be the first, though. [...]
From a few songs, I like to collect different versions. “Four Or Five Times” is one of them and this week’s song is one of my alltime favourite swing tunes. A recording from 1937 by Jimmie Noone (23.04.1895-19.04.1944). Beside Johnny Dodds and Sidney Bechet, Jimmie Noone is considered one of the three top New Orleans clarinetists of the 1920s. Noone had a smoother tone and his style influenced many musicians of the Swing era of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Benny Goodman. As a child, he played the guitar before he started to take clarinet lessons at age 15. [...]
With Louis Armstrong, Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke (10.03.1903-06.08.1931) was one of the most influential jazz cornet soloists of the 1920s. Bix taught himself to play cornet by ear, he never learned to read music well. Unfortunately he drank himself to an early death. He first recorded with the Wolverines in 1924, after which he played briefly for the Jean Goldkette Orchestra before joining Frankie Trumbauer’s Orchestra in 1926. In the same year, Beiderbecke and Trumbauer both joined Goldkette. The following year, Trumbauer and Beiderbecke left Goldkette to join the best-known and most prestigious dance orchestra in the country: the New [...]
While teaching a workshop about jazz and swing music history, I had the idea to post from time to time a song which had a great impact to (early) jazz music. On August 8, 1922, Louis Armstrong moved from New Orleans to Chicago to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. At the Lincoln Gardens, they developed their cornet duet style (“breaks”): Armstrong played a second cornet line while Oliver was playing the first cornet. With Armstrong as a member, the already popular band took Chicago by storm. On April 5, 1923, Oliver and Armstrong travelled by train from Chicago to [...]
For the first time Herräng Dance Camp offered a Swing Orchestra class, taught by the Carling Family (Carling Big Band). I attended this class as a rhythm guitarist and we all had a very inspiring week! Hans Carling, father of the family and one of our teachers, mentioned different recordings, which are eminent in jazz history and which are references for all the following generations of jazz musicians. The early jazz recordings by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five belong to this collection, they have been a revolution in jazz history: here we hear for the first time improvisation. Before [...]
