In a previous post I said that I’d put up a few clips from a tape of Hop the Millennium but then decided that the whole thing was too good and uploaded the whole thing. The event took place over New Year’s 1999/2000 in Mexico City Ensenada, Mexico of all places. There’s a lot of dancing goodness featuring the Rhythm Hot Shots which is the team that begat The Harlem Hot Shots. Southern California represents with a piece by Rusty Frank & Peter Flahiff and another by Peter Loggins & Lisa Ferguson. Keep an eye out for a pimpin performance by the father and son team of “Moke & Poke” a.k.a. Chazz Young and Frankie Manning.
Herrang Instructors by the Numbers
I can get a little obsessive compulsive sometimes. For example, I was looking at the Herrang Dance Camp website and was amazed by the fact that they have 107 teachers. Granted, they are spread out over a month, but they still employ about 30 teachers a week. Only a handful of other events like Camp Jitterbug, Lindy Focus, Lindy Shock, Beantown, and Rock That Swing each have a comparable number of teachers, but those are over long weekends or one week. Herrang usually takes place over four weeks, and this year its going to be five.
Anyway, I was curious as to how they scheduled this mass-o-teachers, so I plugged them into a spreadsheet just to see what it looked like. I’m not going to Herrang this year. I’ve never been actually. I’m just that much of a planning nerd. Simple things like this amuse me.
Jazz Era Voices Goes Live and Needs Your Input
A couple of months ago I posted about Kelly Porter's oral history archive called Jazz Era Voices, and today I got word via Facebook that it is now live. As far as the Lindy Hop community is concerned, I think this is one of the most important projects out there along with The Lindy Hoppers Fund.
Weekly Video Highlights: Goodnight Sweetheart Festival 2010
Last week we had videos from Korea, and now we're across he pond the other way from Hertford, England. This week’s videos brought to you by the 2010 Goodnight Sweetheart Festival. I already talked about one performance from that weekend, so I thought I'd highlight a few others from that event.
Know Your Jazz Dancer: Marie Bryant
Sometimes it takes me a little while to piece things together. A few months ago I attended a presentation of jazz film clips. One of them was Jammin’ the Bluesfeaturing an all star list of musicians such as Sid Catlett, Jo Jones, Lester Young, Illinois Jacquet and a host of others. I hadn’t seen the whole thing in such a long time that it wasn’t until that night that I realized that I knew who the vocalist and dancer was.
Australia Routine Interestingness
This is from Mikey Pedroza who seems really intent on doing this on every continent. It's a routine originally choreographed by Mike Faltesek.
A couple of minor things that caught my eye.
Weekly Video Highlights Camp Swing It
South Korea has got a prety big scene with several large scale events thoughout the year. The first one this year was Camp Swing It which happned a few weeks ago, Jan 22-24. Lots of great teachers and top notch performances
Random DCenes: Triggers
Metro Center. February 13, 2010 at about 6:00 pm. I saw a woman on the metro platform stretching out her hip in the same way a friend of mine does. My friend actually just had surgery on it, so I briefly wondered if the older woman in front of me had the same kind of problem.
She was with her family; her husband or significant other and their teenage daughter. A homeless man came by offering people some pitiful looking short branches that looked like he just plucked them off of a snow covered bush from outside. The gentleman in the family took one and the mother took another. I didn’t see if they offered anything in return, but I did catch them later trying to adorn their daughter with them. She had pigtails, but from her stance and her age, you could tell she was wearing them to be ironic in a budding hipster kind of way. She was not interested in the shrubbery.
Then and Now: Skye Humphries
Staying home most of last week due to the two biggest snowstorms in recent history here in DC, you would think I would have gotten more writing done than I did. Instead I ended up passing the time by ripping a bunch of VHS tapes to digital videos. Last count, I had about 200 clips ripped, but my internet connection isn’t that fast, so it’ll take me some time before I get them all online. It’s been fun going down memory lane with these videos though. Over on the last post for "Artistry in Rhythm," I’ve gotten a couple of comments from Julius whose been talking about the element of joy that seems to be missing in many dancers coming up these days. It’s hard to talk about something like that, but fortunately I’ve dug up some clips that I think illustrate his point.
The Legend of Minnie’s Moochers
As I’ve noted in my Artistry in Rhythm series, we’re getting to a point where things that happened in the early part of the revival are starting to feel a little bit like ancient history. Minnie’s Moochers is a big part of that as I outlined in part three of that series.