I just returned from a 3-week tour with Glenn Crytzer & his Syncopators, a 1920s-30s era Early Jazz band in the tradition of Louis's Hot Five and the early Benny Goodman/Lionel Hampton sextet. Fun music, and quite challenging to play. During the tour, we performed at four distinctly different types of venues: Concert halls, Jazz Clubs, Swing dances, and Trad Jazz Society meetings. Each of those types of venues has their own distinctive vibe and each of those audiences has their own level of interaction with the music being performed live on stage for them. I found that generally speaking, these venues each had a particular type of audience reaction toward the whole experience. Some audiences clapped and cheered and participated and interacted with the music as it was being performed, other audiences completely ignored us the entire time we were on stage; and these distinctly different types of interactions and non-interactions directly corresponded to what type of event we were performing.
So which type of audience was the most appreciative, the most interactive? Which type of audience gave us no indication at all whether or not they cared or even knew that there was a live band working hard for them up there on that stage? The answer will surprise you.
We played in several major cities along the Eastern Seaboard, including Buffalo, Boston, New York, and Washington DC, as well as more inland destinations Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Chicago. I really admire and respect Glenn for his perseverance in putting this tour together, as well as his integrity in insisting on bringing a real piano on tour. That's a lot of work!
Having been a bandleader myself for many years, I understand exactly the hurdles and obstacles that need to be overcome in order to make this tour a reality, as well as the expense involved. The cost of bringing a band on a tour like this is often more than the amount of money the tour takes in; it truly is a labor of love and no one should ever harbor any illusions that getting rich is part of the equation. We consider ourselves lucky if we break even.
Which brings me to my point: If the reward for performing this music is not a monetary one, why do we do this? Why do we subject ourselves to the endless hours in the van between cities, the aches and pains, the weeks at a time without seeing one's spouse or significant other, the diet of junk-food for every meal, the less-than-ideal (often times less-than-sanitary) sleeping conditions, the living-out-of-a-suitcase for weeks at a time with no way of doing laundry, and all the other aspects of being on tour that they don't tell you about in the brochure? Why do we voluntarily do this to ourselves? Why?
I can't speak for every musician everywhere, but I can tell you what motivates most of us: You. The audience. Our goal, as musicians, is to perform our music in a way that causes people to *FEEL* something when they hear it. Deep down, all music is intended to provoke an emotional response among listeners. The emotional response can vary; it can translate into feeling happy, sad, angry, sexy, joyous, and at times all of these at once. And, it can provoke an urge to dance.
Music and dancing are both similar sides of the same emotional coin. There are already so many pithy quotes about dancing and music and how you can't have one without the other, I won't attempt to add to what's already been said about that, except to say that without musicians, dancers would have nothing to dance to, and without dancers, musicians wouldn't have... well, dancers. As a musician friend of mine once said: "We need them more than they need us." Meaning that without dancers, we wouldn't have much of an audience. I suppose that's true; although a lot of music nowadays is designed to be listened to rather than danced to; conversely a lot of dancers have discovered that recorded music is more predictable and therefore easier to dance to, and there does seem to be a mentality among the current crop of swing dancers that recordings played by DJs are somehow more desirable than live music for the purpose of dancing.
And therein lies the problem: we now have an entire generation of fans who grew up hearing recorded music first and foremost, with little or no interaction involved. They turn on the radio to a pop-chart station and are inundated with synthesized drum beats accompanied by electronic instruments programmed by a kid in his basement; they get into an elevator and they hear background music which begs listeners to tune it out instead of paying attention to it; they go to concerts and get a processed light show by a celebrity who lip-synchs her way through the songs while she shakes her booty around the stage surrounded by choreographed dancers in skin-tight bodysuits; they jog or work out to their iPod to the tune of an auto-pitch-corrected diva who sings and/or raps to more synthesized drum beats; or they take a swing dance class and they learn to do the steps to a recording of which the same 16 bars are played over and over while the instructor counts "5-6-7-8..." and if there's any interaction at all, it's a passing "thank you" as the dance students rotate from one partner to the next. None of these fosters any interaction with the music at all, and many of them actually encourage listeners to tune the music out, to actively ignore it. And more specifically, we have what seems like an entire generation of dance-centric audiences who have grown up learning to ignore that vital connection to the music that can only come from a live performance.
I've been a professional musician for over 20 years now. During that time, I have played some very high profile jazz gigs, I have played a lot of background music, I have played for some huge crowds of 50,000 people who were all enjoying and feeling the music with gigantic grins on their faces; and I have played for some very fun crowds of dancers. When the "swing revival" was happening in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we had enormous crowds of swing dancers who absolutely loved dancing to a live band. They took the classes to learn to dance so they could better participate in the experience of dancing to swing music performed by an actual live band. They offered drop-in lessons ahead of the show so that non-dancers might get a chance to learn a few steps so as to better enjoy and more actively participate in the music. When I first started playing swing music for dancers, the dancers appreciated the improvisational nature of the music and would improvise steps to go along. They would participate in the performance right along with the musicians, and they would enthusiastically show their support for live music every chance they got.
And then, something happened.
I'm not sure exactly when; it seems like it must've been gradually declining over the course of the past 7 or 8 years at least. The swing-dancing audiences have seemingly become less interested in the raw energy and anything-can-happen vibe of a live band, and more interested in the consistently safe predictability of those old recordings that their grandparents danced to. It's as if they have learned a set of particular dance steps, in a particular order, to be performed to a particular set of recordings. If they do decide to hire a live band to dance to, they want a band that sounds exactly like those old recordings. And when that band shows up and recreates their old recordings, the musicians are treated to the same indifference that would be afforded a home appliance such as a radio, record player, or coffee pot.
To be met with indifference is the worst thing that can happen to any musician, regardless of genre. We exist, our music exists, to evoke an emotional response of some kind. Of any kind. To be booed off the stage at least would mean that the audience was paying attention. These people don't even give us that.
As a general trend, I have noticed over the past few years that these new Lindy Hoppers are not as much fun to play music for as they were in the late 90s/early 2000s. There is the aforementioned indifference, there is the rampant criticism if we dare to play something that isn't exactly the same as the recordings to which they learned their dance moves.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of swing dancing audiences who do "get it". There are lots of cities with robust swing dancing scenes whose audiences are very connected to live music, they participate in the live interaction between musicians and dancers, and they often go out of their way to seek out live music rather than settling for a "practice dance" to a DJ. During one of our performances in Princeton, New Jersey, I was pleasantly surprised by one dancer who not only took the time to applaud and cheer at the end of each song we played, but also would actually stop dancing in the middle of a song once in a while to clap for a particularly good solo. That kind of behavior coming from a dancer surprised me so much I actually went up to her afterwards and asked her why she was so enthusiastically supportive of the music, when the rest of her dancing compatriots were not; her answer was, "Of course you've got to give props to the band, you guys are the reason we're here!"
We musicians appreciate those kind of audiences very much. We NEED those kind of audiences very much.
But what we do not need are inactive, passive participants. Whether listening or dancing, we need people to be taking part in the music. We need our audience to be alive and interested. Nothing is worse for us than to put our entire heart and soul on the line up on stage and get absolutely no response at all from an entire roomful of people. Our entire purpose as musicians is to create music that evokes a feeling of some kind. I'll say it again: to be met with indifference is the worst thing that can happen to any musician, regardless of genre.
So at the risk of biting the hand that feeds us, allow me to say this: we need dancers to be interested in what we do; but we also need listeners, and we need them both to actually be actively engaged in participating in the music. I would much rather have a small crowd of 20 participants who are genuinely paying attention, rather than a bigger crowd of 200 self-absorbed zombies who don't even notice that there's a band on stage. That kind of scene is no fun for musicians, and it's no fun for non-dancing onlookers who observe a disturbingly-aloof group of people unenthusiastically playing out a series of exercises with all the excitement of walking on a treadmill.
And here is the ultimate problem with that: The lindy hop scene is shrinking. Every year more seasoned hoppers leave, either to go start families and have kids, or to migrate to some other genre of partner-dancing such as salsa or blues. The amount of newcomers to Lindy Hop is getting smaller every year. Why? because many lindy hop scenes in many towns are starting to look more like aerobics class than a fun social activity. And it needs to be a fun social activity in order to attract new lindy hoppers, because every dancer started out as a non-dancer first. Most of the swing dancing revival that took place since the 1990s was fueled by people first showing up as non-dancers, seeing what fun the dancers looked like they were having, and wanting to join in.
That has changed in the past few years, because the lindy hop events of today provide literally no incentive for any non-dancers to show up, let alone want to participate. Many of the lindy hop events I have performed at over the years have been held in dance studios, Grange halls, Lodge halls, and other multipurpose buildings. The halls all seem to have two things in common: a very nice dance floor and horrible acoustics. There is literally no reason why anyone who isn't a dancer would want to have any business showing up to an event in one of these places. I know dancers as a rule don't typically care about anything but the quality of the floor they're dancing on, but non-dancers need ambience. There is a distinct lack of ambience, atmosphere, or anything other than four walls and a dance floor at many of these dancers-only events. It has gotten so that many of us musicians are actually embarrassed to invite our non-dancing friends to our performances at swing dance events, because we know that the non-dancers will have nowhere to sit, no food to nibble on, no beverages to sip, and they will most likely be shunned by the dancers who don't seem to know how to react when "outsiders" show up to their events. Attention dancers: this is no way to grow your scene.
Strangely enough, all of the concert performances we did were met with thunderous applause and enthusiasm. All of the jazz club audiences we played for were similarly enthusiastic. Even the "Trad Jazz" societies, who are normally very particular about what they call "OKOM" (acronym for "Our Kind Of Music") were very appreciative and welcoming, even though what we did was not strictly Dixieland. It was only the lindy hoppers who were noticeably apathetic in large numbers. Also strangely, the lindy hoppers were the only audiences who demanded an encore at the end of every performance. It's as if they weren't paying attention until the music stopped, then they clamored and begged us to keep going. No offense, but you give us absolutely nothing all night, and then you want us to work overtime? What's up with that?
So here is what I think is the problem: Lindy Hoppers have become so focused on their own dancing that they have lost sight of the social aspect that makes it fun for everyone else. They love dancing with each other, they obsess about dancing with each other, but everyone else is left hanging out to dry on the periphery as an outsider. To fix the situation, we all, musicians and dancers alike, need to remember to be all-inclusive, to give non-dancers a reason to be there just as much as dancers. The Lindy Hoppers themselves have tried for years to include non-dancers by offering a drop-in lesson before the dance. Certainly that helps; but it doesn't really address the problem. Drop-in lessons are fine if you already have a large group of non-dancers or beginning dancers who are interested in getting better at dancing, but how do you get those people interested in the first place?
In my next post I will outline some ideas for how I think the lindy hop community can grow their scene and bring more new people in to discover the joy of their dance.
