The Swing Jive Disco Themed Evenings

Step back to the Music of the 1940's and the Second World War

The Second World War

We provide an historical evening's radio style show, providing news bulletins of the time along with all the classic sing a long tunes and dance music of the era. We do not use modern disco lighting for the main presentation instead we use colour wash  lighting that gently changes colour and the mood of the venue. We also use traditional rope lights to capture the feeling of a war time ball room. If you require it we can at some stage in the evening time warp to the another musical era such as the 1950s or any where to the present day using modern lighting to suit.

Glen Miller

In 1942, at the peak of his civilian career, Glen Miller decided he could better serve those in uniform by joining the war effort. At 38 years old, Miller was too old to be drafted, and first volunteered for the Navy but was told that they didn’t need his services. Miller then wrote to the Army’s Brigadier General Charles Young on August 12 1942. Miller persuaded the Army to accept him so he could in his own words, "put a little more spring into the feet of our marching men and a little more joy into their hearts and to be placed in charge of a modernized army band." After being accepted in the Army, Glenn’s civilian band played their last concert in Passaic, New Jersey on September 27, 1942.

He initially formed a large marching band that was to be the core of a network of service orchestras, but his attempts at modernizing military music were met with some resistance from tradition-minded career officers. An example is the arrangement of "St. Louis Blues March", combining blues and jazz with the traditional military march. This was recorded on October 29, 1943 at the Victor studios in New York City. Miller's striking innovations and his adaptations of Sousa marches for the AAF band prompted Time magazine to claim that he had rankled traditionalists in the field of Army music and had desecrated the march king. The magazine also criticized Miller's injection of casual enjoyment into the disciplined cadences of military music, stating that the Army was 'swinging its hips instead of its feet. In the end, the soldiers had a positive reaction to the new music and the Army gave tacit approval to the changes.

The orchestra was first based at Yale University.From mid-1943 to mid-1944 they made hundreds of live appearances, transcriptions, and "I Sustain the Wings" radio broadcasts for CBS and NBC. Miller felt it was important that the band be as close as possible to the fighting troops. In mid-1944 he had the group transferred to London, where they were renamed the "American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force". While in the United Kingdom, the band gave more than 800 performances to an estimated one million Allied servicemen. After one of the band's performances, General "Jimmy" Doolittle told a then Captain Miller, "Next to a letter from home, Captain Miller, your organization is the greatest morale builder in the ETO (European Theater of Operations)."

By February 1944, the band consisted of thirty musicians. The dance band boasted several members of his civilian orchestra, including chief arranger Jerry Gray, alongside stars from other bands such as: Ray McKinley, Peanuts Hucko, and Mel Powell. Johnny Desmond and The Crew Chiefs were the singers,   although recordings were also made with guest stars such as Bing Crosby, Irene Manning , and Dinah Shore. The Dinah Shore recording sessions took place on September 16, 1944, at the EMI studios on Abbey Road (renamed the Abbey Road Studios), and include Shore's version of Stardust. These recordings are of special musical interest as they were some of the final recordings of Miller's career.

Disappearance

On December 15, 1944, Miller, now a major, was scheduled to fly from the United Kingdom to Paris to play for the soldiers who had recently liberated Paris. His plane departed from RAF Twinwood Farm, in Clapham, Bedfordshire, but disappeared over the English Channel and was never found.^[36] Miller's disappearance remains a mystery; neither his remains nor the wreckage of his plane (a single-engined Noorduyn Norseman UC-64, USAAF Tail Number 44-70285) were ever recovered from the water. In 1985, British diver Clive Ward discovered a Noorduyn Norseman off the coast of Northern France. His findings were unverifiable and contained no clues as to what happened. The disappearance still remains unresolved.

Since the disappearance of Miller over sixty years ago, a number of theories about what happened to bandleader have surfaced. Buddy DeFranco, one of the leaders of the post-war Glenn Miller orchestra, told Glenn Miller biographer George T. Simon of the many supposed truths he was told of Miller's true fate while he was leading the Glenn Miller band in the 1970s. DeFranco stated, "If I were to believe all those stories, there would have been about twelve thousand four hundred and fifty eight people there at the field in England seeing him off on that last flight!"

It is now thought that Glenn Miller's plane was accidentally bombed by RAF bombers over the English Channel after an abortive air raid on Germany. The bombers, which were short on fuel, dumped four thousand pounds of bombs in a safe drop zone to lighten the load. The logbooks of Royal Air Force navigator Fred Shaw record that a small single-engined monoplane was seen spiraling out of control, and crashed into the water.

Dance styles of the 1940s

In many scenes outside the United States the term "Swing dancing" is used to refer generically to one or all of the following swing era dances: Lindy Hop, Charleston, Shag, Balboa and Blues. This group is often extended to include Jive, Rock and Roll, Western Swing, Ceroc, and other dances developing in the 1940s and later. Within the United States, the swing dance family is often expanded to include many other social dances, including West Coast Swing, East Coast Swing, Hand Dancing, and so on. A strong tradition of social and competitive boogie woogie and acrobatic rock and roll in Europe add these dances to their local swing dance cultures. In Singapore and other scenes, Latin dances such as salsa and Tango are often taught and danced within the "Swing scene", and for many scenes tap dancing and a range of other jazz dances are considered key, as are hip hop and other contemporary African American street dances. The variations continue, dictated by local dance community interests.

Many swing dancers today argue that it is important to dance many styles of partner dance to improve technique, but also to reflect the historical relationship between these dances in the swing era of the 1920s and 1930s. In the Savoy Ballroom, for example, bands would often play waltzes, Latin songs and so on, as well as swinging jazz. Dancers were often familiar with a wide range of popular and traditional dances.

Later forms from the 1930s and 1940s

Lindy Hop evolved in the late 1920s and early 1930s out of Partnered Charleston. It is characterized by an 8-count break away or "swing out" and has an emphasis on improvisation and the ability to easily adapt to include other steps in 8-count and 6-count rhythms. It has been danced to almost every conceivable style of music with blues or jazz rhythm (with the exception of jazz waltzes), as well as non-traditional styles of music such as hip hop.

Balboa is an 8-count dance that emphasizes a strong partner connection and quick footwork. A product of Southern California's crowded ballrooms, Balboa (or "Bal") is primarily danced in close embrace. A library of open figures, called Bal-Swing, evolved from LA Swing, another Southern California dance that was a contemporary of Balboa. While most dancers differentiate between pure Balboa and Bal-Swing, both are considered to be part of the dance. Balboa is frequently danced to fast jazz (usually anything from 180 to 320 beats per minute), though many like to Balboa to slower tempos.

Collegiate Shag was danced in the early thirties to dance music that emphasized a 2-beat rhythm, and was danced in the varieties of single, double, and triple shag. The variety of names describe the amount of slow (step, hop) steps executed before being followed by a single quick, quick rhythm. The most common form recognized as Collegiate Shag is double shag rhythm.

St. Louis shag done in the "side-by-side" Charleston position. The steps are: rock step, kick forward, step down, kick forward (other leg), stag, step, stomp (repeat). The "stag" is bringing the leg up with the knee bent. As a variation, when repeating, one can do two forward kicks (or "switch, switch", referring to switching feet) in place of the rock step.

Jitterbug is often associated with one form of swing dance, but is in fact a general term for all swing dances and is more appropriately used to describe a swing dancer rather than a specific swing dance (i.e. a jitterbug can dance Lindy Hop, Shag, or another swing dance). The term was famously associated with swing era dancers by band leader Cab Calloway because, as he put it, "They look like a bunch of jitterbugs out there on the floor"[citation needed] due to their fast, often bouncy movements.

Read full the article from wikipedia.

Glen miller

Vera Lynn