19 September 2008

Box of [Fast] Ghosts

Brave Combo has been to Stanford once or twice to play for a Dance Week, and they're an absolute hoot to dance to. A partial description from their website:
Brave Combo is America's premier contemporary polka band, and a Grammy winning one at that. In the same breath, to name some but hardly all of the colors found on Brave Combo's musical palette, one can describe them as a groundbreaking world music act, a hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock'n'roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America's dance bands par excellence.
One of their albums I particularly like is Box of Ghosts (Brave Combo's store | Amazon MP3), a collection of famous classical pieces, rearranged for accordions, horns, and dancing. A number of the tracks are danceable, but here are my favorites:
  • Mozart - Rondo a la Turca - polka (160 bpm)
    Pretty fast. Richard pulls this one out when he's teaching people to do a turning two-step polka (as opposed to galloping) to fast music.
  • Chopin - Waltz in C Minor - waltz (203 bpm)
    Any of you classical types out there will recognize this as Op. 64 No. 2, which is actually in C-sharp minor, but nobody else will probably care. If you thought that last one was fast, try this one. I love it.
  • Rossini - William Tell Overture - polka (108 bpm)
    Okay, okay, here's one that's not so crazy fast. In fact, I'd probably speed it up a bit for dancing (and trim some of the ending as well).

0 comments: