Meetings

Phew, today was a busy day. It started with a meeting that didn’t happen. Second time I’ve been stood up by this particular client — was it something I said? Anyway that meant I could go and get a cup of coffee, which wasn’t all bad. Then straight to a planning meeting, after which I met up with Lotte for a hurried but enjoyable lunch on Lygon. Lotte had been to the doctor for about the third time in three weeks — this time for a weird rash behind her ears — some kind of allergic reaction. She’s been having bad luck lately. Then I had to rush back to the office for another project meeting. I try not to schedule 3 meetings in a day because they generally go for 1.5 hrs each, so it leaves little time for preparation. And sometimes meetings go over-time. It’s not that I don’t really like meetings, though. Truth is, a lot of my work centres around meetings, and when they’re good, I’m in my element. The third meeting today was like that. A good project meeting can achieve a lot.

Selecting tracks

Okay, this is dumb I know, but I was trying to think about the process I go through when selecting new material. I started by thinking of how the listening to new stuff is an active process of filtering, and before I thought about it I was sketching a sort of funnel with new tracks going in the top and various filters being placed at the bottom. A track that wasn’t filtered out would make it into the collection or Library.

Then I realised that it wasn’t so much a matter of a whole bunch of tracks coming in at the same time (although that’s not too far from the truth). It really is a consideration of each track in turn — a serial process. So when I decided to just map it out as a flow chart (above) it looked really straightforward. The diamonds represent decision points. The rest is probably pretty obvious. I guess there is a possibility that the rejected stuff can feed back into the listened stuff, but in practice I don’t do this nearly enough. The “category” decision at the bottom is not something I use much, but I’d include here the setting up of playlists, classifying tracks by BPM, recording year, and that sort of thing. All of this is sort of adding categories for easier use.

Anyway now that I have it in this form I can’t see any possible reason why someone would want to read it, so I naturally put it straight into my blog!

The Three Thirds Theory

For a while now I’ve been talking about the three thirds theory of DJing. I think it was at the DJ Summit at SwingCity that I first started talking to people about it. I guess it was operating at some kind of subconscious level until the moment that I started trying to explain it, and since that time I have thought about it off and on I guess. I still don’t consciously use it as a method for every set I put together, but it does come into my thinking every now and then.

Well, it’s now, and I need to make sure my set on Friday kicks butt, so I am going to put down my thoughts here. The Three Thirds Theory says that whenever you’re DJing for a regular crowd you want to have three elements in rougly equal proportions: Old, Current, and New. Let me break those down a bit so that there’s no misunderstandings. Old stuff is stuff that you know your current audience — the dancers in front of you at that moment — are familiar with. The audience varies all the time, so you need to be aware of what they are familiar with. Which songs never fail to bring a smile to people’s face? What can you put in on and know, pretty much without fail, will haul their asses off that comfy chair and get them up?

For the sake of it, I’m going to list a few tracks of mine that I would think would be in this first category on Friday night down here: Shout Sister Shout (Lucky Millinder), Royal Garden Blues (Bill Henderson), Rockhouse (Ray Charles), Corner Pocket (Ellington/Basie), Jeep Jockey Jump (Glenn Miller). Any list of favourite is completely independent of feel, tempo, style, or whatever, so this isn’t a guide to choosing which track is right for the mood of the crowd. Just a further means of categorising things.

The second element is the current stuff. What’s popular right now? What are people just getting used to hearing? What are they waiting to hear? Songs in this category right now with your average crowd at the Fun Pit, for me, include: ‘Bill Bailey’ (Ella Fitzgerald), ‘Apollo Jump’ (Lucky Millinder), ‘Lavendar Coffin’ (Lionel Hampton), ‘A Pretty Girl, A Cadillac And Some Money’ (Buddy Johnson), ‘Barn 12’ (Harry James) and ‘Drop Me Off in Harlem’ (Victriola).

This second category can be hard to pick, because it’s hard to keep on top of whether things are just now becoming popular or whether they’re just being played a lot. You can also forget that things have been around for a while, or miss stuff that people really hang out for. I just focus on my own stuff for the most part, and this second category would be stuff I have in “high rotation” at the present time.

The third element is the new stuff. Now, I’m specifically not talking about new recordings here, although from time to time I do find new recordings or new releases that will be added to the new category. What new refers to is the “bleeding edge” stuff — what the audience is just hearing for the first or second time. I have long believed that it is important to introduce stuff your audience hasn’t heard much of if things are going to keep fresh. One of the most common problems with DJs I hear is that they play only stuff that they have heard others play and succeed with. They end up sounding like everyone else without really carving out their own niche of interest. This is a sign of a DJ not having a big enough collection, of course — but it’s also a sign that they don’t listen to their own material. Just about anyone has enough material to put together a good set, if they only know their own stuff well enough.

I had the rather terrifying experience of being asked to play some tracks when I didn’t have my trusty laptop handy the other day. It was during the break while the Cairo Club was completely cutting it up at Mayfields, and there was a strong feeling that the feeling was going to be lost during an extended band break. I jogged to my car and picked out the one CD I had that could do the job — a 1 hr collection I bought recently called Harlem Stomp. It’s just one of those cheap compilations you see everywhere (I can’t even find it listed on AMG) but it has some of my favourites and I thought it might have some versions of things I didn’t have. Anyway, all I did was stand in the DJ booth and choose the song order. The toughest part was just choosing the right feel to get people started and then build something up to where I could play the best stuff on the CD a couple of fast classics: ‘Jumpin’ at the Woodside’ and ‘Bugle Call Rag’. Now, if two songs ever said “jam please”, those are them. Anyway, it worked, and I had strangers coming up to the booth telling me I was a DJ god and stuff, but the catch was that I didn’t even have my gear there — just chose a song order from the one swing CD I happened to have in my car.

I know full well that the atmosphere in there is not something I had created — it was a product of the band being so good and a bunch of inspired dancers waiting around for something to bust out to, however I do believe there is some skill in knowing your music well enough to manipulate it. I do know that putting the CD on from start to finish would not have worked. The management already had a CD on with similar stuff playing before I started, and nobody was dancing.

Anyway, in a round about way, that little anectote is just an example of what I was trying to get at with the New category. Too many people seem to look for something radically different when they look for their new material. They often go for something that just doesn’t swing — either it’s tinkly complicated 7 minute bop stuff with undancable bass solos (ugh) or some monotonous R&B variant. Now, I am not saying that R&B isn’t fun, and I am definitely not a purist. But you have to look hard at whether something really makes a good dance song. Is it short enough? Does it have enough going on to make it interesting? Does it have a swinging beat, or is it something different (shuffle rhythms are a personal dislike of mine and a sin committed by way too many DJs for my liking).

The truth is that good new lindy hop stuff is probably going to sound quite a bit like good old stuff, but different. It’s probably going to swing if it’s any good. It’s probably not going to be produced by a ska band. It’s probably not going to have a latin beat, or be a hip hop tune. I don’t rule these areas out by any stretch of the imagination, either as novelty songs or as a whole new area of dance exploration. Hell, go for it — I dance to ‘Plenty’ every time it’s played and couldn’t think of anything I’d like more than busting out to some hip hop stuff. But do I go looking for those tunes to expand my collection? Nah. There’s way too much good swingin’ lindy hop stuff yet to be discovered.

So what will be on my new list this Friday? I managed to snaffle a bunch of stuff on the locally produced Flashback label in the $3 bin and I got a stack of Lunceford, Barnett, and Hamp that I hadn’t seen yet. I also remembered to use most of my monthly quota on eMusic.com to snaffle a few albums and pick the eyes out of some others. I got some brilliant Roy Milton stuff, including a version of ‘Taint Me that I am officially In Love with, and the best version of Blue Skies that I know. I grabbed everything I could get from Nellie Lutcher in their collection (an album called Hurry On Down) an album by Big Joe Turner (All the Classic Hits 1938-1952) and a couple of songs from Illinois Jacquet, including the fast and gorgeous ‘Bottoms Up’ (what an excellent riff that is). The posthumously released Grammy winning ‘Genius Loves Company’ from Ray Charles and others was worth it mostly for listening value, but I will probably spin ‘Fever’ (duet with Natalie Cole) if the moment is right.

I snaffled Bill Bailey from the Apple ITMS because I know it’s a current favourite (that’s category 2, for those of you keeping score at home) and didn’t have it. It’s hard to get on CD. Mr Borgida also recently turned me onto some new stuff including the most fantastic version of Strictly Instrumental (a vocal, would you believe) by Eddie Jefferson and a few other characteristically Bill offerings that I don’t think anyone is playing yet. Bill’s tracks are almost bound to be hits, going on past experience, but their introduction must be managed carefully. You can’t go overBilling people in one set, because they will not appreciate how good it is!

So we’re back to the Three Thirds Theory again. Use this information wisely, dear reader.

The Pope’s Dead

It’s quite strange reading about the Pope dying just after having finished reading Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons. The basis of the storyline for the book is the death of the Pope, so it goes into minute detail about the rituals associated with the election of a new Pope by the Cardinals. Quite a canny move by Brown to concoct a storyline that was likely to be of interest within the few years after it being published, you might say. Actually the more I think about Brown’s work, the more I see it as having commercial, rather than artistic, intensions. For instance, the controversy surrounding The Da Vinci Code (and no doubt Angels and Demons too) is surely welcome exposure for the publishers.

Anyway, due to the remarkable background research Brown does on his novels I know that Cardinals from around the world will now assemble in a ‘conclave’ in the Sistine Chapel in Rome to elect a new Pope. Once they enter the conclave, they can’t leave until the election has been completed. The voting rituals are quite interesting too — after an unsuccessful ballot an appointed cardinal burns the papers with chemicals to produce a black smoke that can be seen from outside. A successful ballot burns white, alerting the world that a new Pope has been appointed.

Sunday fun

Sundays are definitely my favourite day of the week at the moment. These are the days when we really plan very little, usually sleeping in before heading out later for something fun to do. We had had a quiet Saturday night, with Lotte preferring to stay home to get over her ‘flu shot and me going round to Crinnie’s to watch the new Lano and Woodley DVD. But we still needed to catch up on some sleep, so it was at least 11.00am before we got out of bed.

Our Sunday agenda was then organised: a yoga class at 4pm at Clifton Hill, and a party at 8pm. Somewhere in there we would need to eat, and there was some talk of stopping by Mayfields for a secret meeting or something, but that was as far as the planning went. As it turned out, the yoga class was really excellent (and badly needed). I have a major crick in my back at the moment and I need as much stretching and strengthening as I can get. Lotte also liked the class, although she found it pretty tough with her ‘flu-ridden muscles complaining to her all the way.

We did stop by Mayfields briefly and I got a few dances in before the secret meeting was completed. Then we offered The Swede a ride home because she was looking decidedly down in the mouth about not being able to dance. She finds out tomorrow if she will be going in for an operation on her hip. Poor Swede. After that it was straight to the cast party for Ursus & Nadeschkin. Nadja is a Lindy Hop friend from Switzerland whose show has been playing at the Comedy Festival. It was very good — we saw it on Wednesday night — and it was a big success from their point of view. The party was at a huge place on Richmond hill with a magnificent big outdoor spa, so Lotte and I braved the evening cold and took advantage of the bubbles. It was very warm in the spa and we soaked our yoga-extended muscles. There were only about 15 people at the party but it was fun just being at this place. It concluded with a battle for honour with a game called Boccerball — a sort of table soccer game where you have to roll large ballbearings down chutes to knock the ball into your opponent’s goal. I won my match 5-2!

Inspiration and DJing for newbies

Just when I was thinking that Melbourne’s social lindy hop scene is on the slide (see this entry), it jumps back up and takes me by surprise. First there was the good fun vibe of the Easter Hop, which seems to keep on keeping on from year to year. Then last Sunday’s Cairo Club performance, which packed a very meaty punch for a lot of us, and has been a source of energy for a lot of the CRR crew since. Then last night we headed to CBD and there was a nice crowd that included a few from interstate and overseas. I can’t say the music grabbed me much, but I did enjoy quite a few nice dances. And tonight was one of the best vibes at the Fun Pit for me for a long time. There were heaps of people and it didn’t seem at all too dominated by cliques (an inevitable but frustrating part of any swing scene). The super-friendly Tim approached me and asked if I would mind DJing there next time. I chose the late set because I always favour DJing to the hardcore and experienced swingers. I admit to opting for the easier option. It’s just that my own tastes have moved on from the days when I was starting out.

Actually, tonight Doz and I had an interesting conversation about what to choose for less experienced dancers. Conventional wisdom still says that the best stuff for this crew is neo swing and (sometimes) R&B, because a). they are more ‘mainstream’ than vintage artists and b). their rhythm lines are easier to follow. My own theories about the topic were once sort of along those lines, but have become more developed these days. As I have begun to think more about swing music, it seems like I’ve started to understand the way the original swing bands actually worked, as well as typical swing themes and structures. I guess teaching beginner classes for about 6 years now has also given me a handy touchstone as far as appropriate music for inexperienced dancers. The truth is, it’s not necessary to make a choice between good vintage music and music that new dancers can enjoy dancing to. You just need to know what the elements of the right music are.

First, I look for stuff with a good strong bassline. Walking bass tracks are good (My Baby Just Cares For Me is a classic example). Obviously other parts of the rhythm section come into it as well, such as rhythm guitar, piano, and particularly cymbals. But more often than not you want to be dancing on the bass. It probably sounds extremely obvious, but it’s much easier for people to get the idea of a swinging rhythm (meaning a rhythm that is 4/4 with the emphasis on the even counts) if you have tracks that have an easily heard rhythm section. Next, I look for songs with good strong themes. It’s dead easy to pick up the start of a bar or phrase if you have a repeated section of music to go on. This is one reason I don’t favour playing a lot of R&B or standard 12-bar blues — the blues structure has themes that are not at all like typical swing themes and can catch people off guard. They’re definitely going to be familiar with blues structures and swing structures whether they know it or not, but when you mix the two together a lot at a time when they are trying desperately to get a feel for some of the essentials, it does tend to confuse people a bit. So I stick to mostly AABA song structures for beginners.

Finally, I don’t push the tempo up too high for less experienced dancers. Another easy one. Wow, all of this took a lot longer to type than it did for Doz and I to talk about tonight. Anyway, it may be helpful to somebody somewhere out there, or I may come back to this and write some more at a later stage.