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The Dances
A short introduction to Swing
Swing has to do with the rhythm of the music where accented notes are played at roughly twice the emphasis of the non-accented notes. A simple way of explaining this is to say the word “Bicycle.” It’s got three syllables, but the emphasis of the first syllable is roughly twice that of the last two.Swing is the predominant style of jazz music played from roughly the late 1920s to mid-1940s and music played in this style. Swing is usually, but not always, played by big band ensembles using a rhythm section including drums, bass, sometimes a guitar and almost always a piano, a brass section of trumpets and trombones, and a reed section of saxophones and clarinets.
Musicians and bandleaders who are most known for their contributions to this music include Benny Goodman, Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Billie Holliday, Jimmie Rushing, Slim Gaillard, Lionel Hampton, Slam Stewart, Fats Waller, Nina Simone, Oscar Peterson, Louis Armstrong...and we're just getting started. Many musicians also carried the tradition of hard-swinging rhythm past the Swing era, and bring to us with a whole new generation of Swinging Jazz to listen and dance to.
Lindy Hop: the dance that started it all. You may remember seeing it (poorly) performed on the Gap Khakis Swing ad a few years ago, or in the movie Swing Kids even farther back. It is the original Swing dance, and it was named after Charles A. Lindbergh, the greatest hero of the day. Legend has it that the dance was spontaneously named by one of the Harlem’s best in the day, Shorty George Snowden, when he saw a newspaper whose headline read “Lindy Hops the Atlantic.” Today the Lindy Hop stands as America’s true National Folk Dance. It was first created by African-American kids during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s and danced to the hot new popular music of the day—swing. Like the Swinging Jazz it is danced to, Lindy Hop is improvisational. The original forms of Lindy Hop borrowed from and intermixed with the Charleston and Jazz Steps. Today’s Lindy Hoppers also glean from Tango, Hip Hop, Carolina Shag, and West Coast Swing, just to name a few.
The Lindy Hop has enjoyed a Renaissance in recent years, starting in 1984 when Frankie Manning, a pioneer of the dance in the 1930s and choreographer for the famous troupe Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, was coaxed out of retirement by Steven Mitchell and Erin Stevens. Interest in Swing music, the Lindy Hop, and surrounding culture spiked in the late 1990s when the Swing craze boomed nationally. The dance today is alive and well, and its practitioners are forging new paths with the timeless dance.
