DJ Ryan Swift

Today the NYTimes published a great writeup about swing dancing in NYC, and heavily featured Yehoodi.com’s Frim Fram Jam, which you probably know I help run.

THERE are swinging parties in Manhattan nearly ever night. The trick is in knowing where to find them.

Take a recent Thursday: Sandwiched between a Blarney Stone and a liquor shop on Eighth Avenue just south of Penn Station and up four flights of stairs was a scene invisible to most New Yorkers. Wild and sweaty, loud and crowded, it featured scores of smiling, ever-shifting couples energetically executing the kinetic choreography of the Lindy Hop, the Charleston, the jitterbug , the Balboa, the collegiate shag. They danced East Coast and West Coast styles and bluesy New Orleans freestyle.

This party, the Frim Fram Jam, is a weekly event organized by the local chapter of a national swing dance network called Yehoodi, after “Who’s Yehoodi (Yehudi)?,” a song popularized by Cab Calloway. Held at a studio called You Should Be Dancing and drawing more than 150 people a week, the Frim Fram Jam is a popular destination within a throbbing, thriving urban subculture: Manhattan’s swing-dance demimonde.

The article quotes several NYC regulars and also features Swing46, Swing Remix, and the NYSDS and is some good visibility for the scene, even though it states the revival is 3 years old (?) and unfortunately gets Gordon Webster’s name wrong.

Check out the full piece on NYTimes.com, including my crotchety quote about feeling old (that I don’t actually remember saying), right before the description of a “trim and energetic” 63-year-old.

For years, the donated piano sat upright and unused in a corner of the nursing home’s cafeteria. Now and then someone would wheel or wobble over to pound out broken notes on the broken keys, but those out-of-tune interludes were rare. Day after surrendering day, the flawed piano remained mercifully silent.

Then came a new resident, a musician in his 80s with a touch of forgetfulness named Boyd Lee Dunlop, and he could play a little. Actually, he could play a lot, his bony fingers dancing the mad dance of improvised jazz in a way that evoked a long life’s all.

The lean times and the flush. The Saturday night hop and the Sunday morning hymn. Those long drives in a Packard to the next gig. That fine woman Adelaide, oh Adelaide, down in North Carolina. The deaths of a beloved aunt and a difficult marriage. Some things you don’t forget, so Mr. Dunlop keeps a white towel handy to wipe his eyes dry.

And so Mr. Dunlop would have remained, summoning transcendence from a damaged piano in the Delaware Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, his audience a couple of administrators, a few nurses and many patients beset with dementia, loneliness and age — were it not for a chance encounter and some cheesecake.

Instead, Boyd Lee Dunlop, 85, is the featured performer at a concert on Saturday night at the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Buffalo. Admission is $10. And if you want to buy his debut CD, that will cost you another $15.

Read the full article and see video of Mr. Dunlop at the New York Times.

78s, Photos, Even Sweat From Brow of a Legend

Another fragment of Louis Armstrong’s legacy is back where it belongs.

The Armstrong museum and archive in Queens has received a treasure-trove of rare 78-r.p.m. records, bootleg tapes, five personal letters, candid photographs, European posters, news clippings, discographies, even weight-loss tips — 192 cubic feet in all — from the estate of a Swedish man known as the world’s second-largest private collector of Satchmoiana.

There is also a sweat-stained handkerchief that belonged to Armstrong, who was famous for theatrically wiping his brow between the trumpet solos he blew better than almost anyone else.

“We’re excited about it because there might be some valuable DNA in it, what with cloning and all,” joked Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona.

The gift comes at an especially auspicious time for the museum because construction plans have been completed for a two-story, $17.5 million visitor center to be built across the street from the modest brick detached house at 34-56 107th Street where Armstrong and his wife Lucille lived from 1943 until his death in 1971. Lucille remained there until her death in 1983, and the home, almost precisely as it stood at her passing, was opened to the public in 2003. The money for the visitor center has been raised and construction is expected to start next summer, with the opening envisioned two years later.

Read the full article at NYTimes.com

‘Jazz - The Smithsonian Anthology’ Out March 29 by Ben Ratliff for the NY Times

LOOK out: there’s a new jazz canon coming toward you. A boxed set of six discs to be released on March 29, it emanates from the Smithsonian Institution; it is called “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology .” It surveys jazz chronologically, from its complicated beginnings to its just as complicated near-present.

It was assembled by scholars and critics and broadcasters: serious names. It begins with a solo-piano composition by a Texas-born composer whose father had been a slave (Scott Joplin) and ends with a quartet track led by a Polish trumpeter (Tomasz Stanko) who loves Miles Davis. Text drips from the package, an essay for each of its 111 tracks.

You’re energized, right? Your heartbeat just picked up, your amygdala’s plumping out. You want to know what canons usually address: how and where the anthologizers claim jazz started, how they frame it now. And in the middle, how do they really feel about Coltrane, about late Billie Holiday and Lester Young, about Ahmad Jamal, Miles at the Plugged Nickel, Afro-Latinism, cool and free and fusion, live vs. studio, unsung heroes? More: Is jazz a musical language or a philosophy of action, or is it merely a genre, the art that descends from a body of recorded masterpieces? What’s its relation to race, or sensuality, or geography? And what is the deal with its rhythm sections — why do they sound so incredibly different every 15 years? What keeps the music changing? What makes it tick? What is jazz?