Country West Coast Swing

At recent Faster Polkas and Friday Night Waltzes, Bob and Richard have played some fun west coast swings, reminding me how much I like country songs for west coast.  My family listened to a lot of country music when I was younger, so I may like it more than most people, but even country western skeptics should enjoy dancing to these songs. Unlike my earlier list of west coast swing songs, which was more pop heavy, these songs are generally less bouncy and more slinky.

• Reba McEntire : Why Haven't I Heard From You? (111 bpm) - Amazon MP3, Last.fm
  This one has a great swingy beat; a no brainer for dancing.
• Mary Chapin Carpenter : I Feel Lucky (121 bpm) - Amazon MP3, Last.fm; and Shut Up and Kiss Me (120 bpm)- Amazon MP3, Last.fm
  Great voice, great lyrics. Both of these are faster and longer; mostly they're fine as is, but I did cut off about 20 seconds of the latter when I played it at Friday Night Waltz

• Collin Raye : My Kind of Girl (115 bpm) - Amazon MP3, Last.fm
  At just shy of 3 minutes long, this one is a perfect tempo and length.
• Kathy Mattea : 455 Rocket (122 bpm) Amazon MP3, Last.fm
  I've never heard this one played, but it's one of my mother's favourite songs. The title refers to the 455 cubic-inch rocket V8 engine found in 1970s Oldsmobiles.
  

Want more? StreetSwing has a great list.

Waltzing with the KGB

KGB is a trio from Seattle that plays music for contra dances, English country dances, and couple dances. If you're in the SF bay area, you should come and hear them live this Saturday, the 10th. They'll be playing at the Oakland Friday Night Waltz (yes, on Saturday) and doing a mix of contra dances and couple dances. It'll be great.

Most of their albums have a lot of contra dance music on them (which is great), but they also just recently released a new CD with a solid hour of original waltz music: The Red Light of Evening. It's a lovely album, with a nice range of tempos for different types of waltzes. Richard Powers played a couple of them at FNW in December, though I don't recall which ones. These are some of my favorites after my first listen:

• Speak of the Deverills - Rotary waltz, 162 bpm
  I like the way this one slides between different moods.
• A Field of Shooting Stars - Cross-step waltz, 126 bpm
  Might be good to slow this one down a tad, though I haven't tried actually dancing it yet.
• Birdsong Spring - Rotary waltz / Redowa, 165 bpm
  This one really does spring along in a very birdlike way in places. It would probably be fun to redowa to.
• The Clock Stopped - Cross-step waltz, 112 bpm
  This one is actually on their "Contra-Intelligence" album, but it's worth including here as long as we're talking about KGB waltzes. If you go to FNW around here, this is the tune that's always played for the cross-step mixer.

Update: The dance on Saturday was fantastic. If you ever get a chance to dance to KGB, take it.

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).