Laura Light

Laura Light is a fiddler, singer, and composer from Virginia, to whose music I had the pleasure of contradancing a few years ago. (She snuck in a swing tune as well, which was a fun surprise.) For those of you in the Bay Area for Thanksgiving, she'll be out here again this weekend, playing at the Palo Alto Contra Dance on the 29th. Come dance off the extra calories!

I've got her album No Gravity (Amazon, eMusic, iTunes), which has a lot of good fiddle tunes and a few good couple-dancing tracks to call out:

• Two Rivers - Cross-step Waltz, 121 bpm
  This is probably my favorite of the batch. Really lovely.
• This Was Meant to Be - Swing, 145 bpm
  "How can I explain this incredible feeling? / Feet on the ground, I'm dancing on the ceiling...."
• Mid-Winter Waltz - Rotary Waltz, 174 bpm
  A great Larry Edelman tune that I remember from one of the first cassettes of "real" music I ever owned.
• The Last Waltz of the Millenium - Cross-step Waltz, 111 bpm
  Probably won't be relevant again for a while, but it's a waltz, nonetheless. :-)

Also, in the process of writing this post, I found that she has another album, called Katchemak Bay Waltz, which is entirely waltzes. Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere to buy MP3s -- it looks like you can only buy a CD here. So I haven't listened to most of it yet, though there are a couple sample MP3s on that page. (Including an interesting version of "Scarborough Fair.")

Friday Night Waltz Set List

What did you think of the music? Let us know in the comments!

Vermillion Lies

Vermillion Lies is my latest jackpot find from my random Last.fm browsing. They're one of those bands that has such a delightful variety of styles and sounds that you never quite know what you're going to hear next. Their press page talks about their "unique brand of beauty, silliness, and creativity," and "songs ranging from lyrical folk ballads to raucous circus marches." I've been listening to their two albums on repeat for the last day or so, and I was also glad to find a number of danceable songs, so here they are.

• I Should Fly (Rotary waltz, 160 bpm) - Amazon MP3, Last.fm
  And if you can't fly, you should waltz. :-) Good contrast between verses and chorus, which is always nice to have for dancing.
• Shady (Polka, 130 bpm) - Amazon MP3, Last.fm
  Nice mandolin part in this one. Would need some shortening and maybe a little slowing down for dancing purposes, though.
• Blue (One-step, 112 bpm) - Amazon MP3, Last.fm
  One of the sisters can do a vocal style that reminds me of Ingrid Lucia (of the Flying Neutrinos), or maybe Billie Holiday, which gives it a very vintage sort of sound with the swing guiter. Plus, there's a kazoo!
• Done Wrong (Polka, 122 bpm) - Amazon MP3, Last.fm
  Similar style to "Blue," but the instrumentation makes it sound more polka-y.
• Bone Yard (Cross-step waltz, 118 bpm) - Amazon MP3, Last.fm
  Sort of a dark one, and with a lot going on the arrangement which could potentially muddy things, but I think the piano keeps the beat consistently enough to dance to.
• Global Warming (Rotary waltz, 155 bpm) - Amazon MP3, Last.fm (free download!)
  This one is probably better for listening than dancing, but I wanted to include it just for general amusement and silliness. "Everything's going swimmingly."

Laurent Fourgo

Special bonus today: The music in this post is not only purchasable and downloadable, but go-hear-them-live-able as well. (Assuming you live around the Bay Area.)

I had dinner last Friday at Mandaloun in Redwood City, to the music of Laurent Fourgo & His Ensemble. Lots of good, standard swing stuff, with the added interest of having French versions of lots of the lyrics. In fact, the CD (Amazon MP3, Last.fm) appears to be entirely bilingual. Anyway, they're perfectly danceable, and if you sit in the right spot you can have a little bit of floor space to hop into and dance when the mood strikes. (As long as you watch out for passing waiters, not to mention the clarinetist who would sometimes get loose and start wandering around on his solos.)

They seem to have been a hit with the rest of the customers and the management as well, since they announced that they now have a regular gig there, twice a month. Keep an eye on their calendar to find out when those will be. The restaurant itself was good as well, so all in all it makes a quite recommendable outing for a Friday evening if you're stuck without an FNW or other dancing (or even a Friday evening on your way to other dancing).

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).

Redowa III

Looking at the categories on the right here, it's clear we've written more about waltz music than any other type.  However, since the last three posts have been other dance music, I figure it's time for another set of good redowa songs.

• Hevia - Entremediu (152 bpm)
  I first heard this at Big Dance in 2006. It's a bit like the Corrs' "Erin Shore" (featured in my first redowa post) in that it's dramatic, Celtic, and has an energetic percussion section perfect for redowa. What "Entremediu" has that "Erin Shore" lacks, of course, is bagpipes :). The link is to the Spanish iTunes store, which probably isn't very helpful, and I'm feeling nice because I spent forever trying to find this song and ended up buying the CD online, so here's an easier option.
• Kevin Burke - La Partida (161 bpm) - iTunes, eMusic
  Picking up the tempo a bit, here's an instrumental waltz tune which Graham introduced me to. It's very bouncy and has some fun syncopated parts which lend themselves well to redowa and pivots. Mary Lea also has nice version, and I just found out from her website that this is a Venezuelan waltz, and YouTube further informs be that it was originally a piece called "Queiro ser tu sombra" (I want to be your shadow).
  
• Chantal Kreviazuk - Time (170 bpm)
  And now for something completely different. Well, okay, not completely. I love waltzing to this song, and while it's a bit on the fast side and doesn't have an obvious 'redowa break,' the energy is high enough to support a bit of leaping. I'd suggest, however, cutting it down by about a minute.  Take a listen and see if the opening measures don't just make you want to waltz:

Bollywood Schottisches

Several years ago, someone in the Bay Area dance community (maybe Deb Henigson) had the brilliant insight that the rhythms of bhangra, a folk music and dance from India, and schottische, a Bohemian dance popular in Victorian ballrooms, were the same. So here's some schottische music from India. It's worth noting that all three songs are, in true Bollywood fashion, over 5 minutes long. They're also fast, so I'd advise both shortening and slowing them down for dancing.

• Sadhna Sargam et al - Maahi Ve
  I was introduced to bhangra at Decadance's Spring Show 2005, where they performed a bhangra-schottische fusion to "Maahi ve." That piece is still one of my favourite Deca numbers, and you can see it at around 1:20 in this video. After checking out the music video for "Maahi Ve" on YouTube and finding out that it was from the film Kal Ho Naa Ho, I actually watched the whole movie to see this colourful, extravagant production in context.
• Shankar Mahadevan - Pretty Woman
  Turns out out most Bollywood films are long (we're talking over 3 hours) and chock full of singing and dancing. Here's another song from the Kal Ho Naa Ho soundtrack, and I definitely recommend watching the clip(below) if you want a taste of how over-the-top these song-and-dance numbers can be. Graham did a nice edit of "Pretty Woman" which we played at Friday Night Waltz in June.
  
• Shankar Mahadevan, Shaan, Mahalaxmi Iyer - Rock N Roll Soniye
  This is the "Bollywood schottische" that Richard Powers plays most often. I think "soniye" means something like "pretty girl" or "my love" -- it's a term of endearment.