Our friend Anna singing for the very first time with the New Traditions big band. I think she was a little nervous at first, but really hits a home run on the ending. Her grandmother, who sang with big bands in the swing era, would be very proud! I know we all are!

Swing and Big Band Station (click to listen)

Let’s face it, swing and big band music has all but disappeared from the airwaves. For years, I searched online for good stations, and was mostly frustrated. Well, not to sound cliche, but the Internet has changed all that. Pandora is perfect for those of us who love niche or “dated” genres such as swing and big band.

In case you are behind, Pandora uses the music genome project to build custom stations tailored just to you. Basically you tell it the music you like and it finds music similar to that to play along with it in a station. In a nutshell, it compares your music tastes to others and “magically” makes a playlist on the fly. This is great for people like me since I want to hear the music I like, but I also want to hear “new” music (or at least music new to me) in the playlist as well. I mean iTunes and iPods are great, but I also love to hear different tunes in the same genre as my collection. After all, that’s how I find great music to put into my collection in the first place.

Pandora is all this and more. Best of all, you can share your stations with others. For example, click on the icon (above right) to hear one of my stations. It’s tailored to my tastes, so it’s mostly classic swing artists. However, I left it open enough so I get to hear stuff new to me every so often. As a result, it’s more of a “listening” station and not necessarily a “dancing” station. Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own station.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the genome project by any means, but I have learned a few things about Pandora over time. It is very possible to narrow down a station too much. If you do, you tend to hear the same songs over and over again. There seems to be an art to creating a station that both encompasses your tastes, sticks to a genre, but plays a variety too. Here are a few tips:

• When starting out, don’t give Pandora just one artist or song to start with. Make use of the “add variety” feature on the station. Add in other artists and songs within that genre that you like too.
• Don’t overuse “thumbs up” and “thumbs down”. If you rate every song, your station will just get more and more narrow until it only plays just the songs you like. Might as well just pull the iPod out at that point.
• Having said that, make sure you do rate the songs you really do or don’t like.
• Think twice before you hit the “thumbs down” button. Just because you don’t like a particular song, you don’t send the wrong message to Pandora. For example, I don’t like bebop jazz. However, it occasionally pops up in my swing station. I don’t give a thumbs down to, say, a Count Basie bebop tune, but I will give a thumbs down to an artist more known for bebop like Max Roach.
• If you want a good “genre based” station, treat it like a regular radio station. You are going to hear some songs you don’t like or don’t like as well as others. You wouldn’t call and complain to the station for that. However you would if they strayed out of format (time to use the “thumbs down”).

Hope this helps! Be sure to follow us on Facebook and I’ll post some of my stations there every so often.

Let’s face it, swing and big band music disappeared from the airwaves years ago for most of the country. In Orlando, we use to have a “music of your life” AM station, but that switched formats a while ago. We do have a local jazz station that will occasionally play some swing, but overall, they are a jazz format, not vintage big band and swing. For those of us who love the format, we are left finding other sources.

But wait, isn’t radio dead? We all have iPods now. Why not just use that? Good question. Well, to start, many people may not have extensive swing music collections. For those of us who do, it’s really nice to hear the variety of other people’s collections. Swing is a huge genre and I am always looking for songs and renditions of songs that I have never heard before. I often jot down notes of songs I want to get while listing to various swing stations.

There use to be a good swing/big band music channel on Brighthouse cable. However, I recently flipped over to the channel and found that they altered the format. It’s now something like “sing and swing” and it’s simply horrible. Very little swing and a lot of sleepy show tunes. Not that I am looking for strictly dance music, but the music selection left much to be desired.

My other source recently has been XM radio. Their 40′s station use to be somewhat sleepy. While it was good vintage music, for every one up-tempo song they played, there were about 3 to 5 slow ballads. It was so bad, that I even isolated their pattern. They would never play two up-tempo songs in a row. However, that all seemed to change sometime after the Sirius merger. Now their music mix is quite good and is probably one of the best vintage swing and big band mixes around. The only problem is that I hate paying the ever increasing rates for XM and I worry how long they will keep the format since everyone seems to be targeting stations to the tastes of a certain mainstream market.

The other option, of course, is to go online. I have to admit, the selection is large. Almost too large. The wide selection seems to allow people to focus online stations on certain niches. I’ve seen everything from straight up Lindy Hop dance music to really obscure pre-jazz era music. The problem seems to be finding something good and general. A nice mix of everything. Lately, I have been listening to The 1920′s Radio Network. Despite the name, they play everything from the 20′s through the 40′s. Their music seems to range from recognizable swing era tunes to the very obscure. Maybe not the best mix out there, but overall, enjoyable!

So here is my question to you: What is your swing/big band music source? Know of a good online station? Please feel free to post it in a comment!

I found this article  online this morning when I came into work and thought it was definitely worth sharing. It’s all about Django Reinhardt, his music, his origins, and how he lived his life. If you’ve never listened to or heard a Django song, you are really missing something. His music is quite upbeat and “plucky” as they reference in this article. I’m such a huge fan of 30′s hot jazz…..it literally inspires me to do things on the floor style wise that I wouldn’t otherwise do. And Django’s music falls smack dab in the middle of that category (30′s hot jazz) for me. So take a few minutes when you have time and check out some of his music  (iTunes link) to see what you’ve been missing!

Dawn and I frequently get a lot of people ask us about music to practice to, so a while back I created a page with some music suggestions with links to various CDs. I’ve been amazed how quickly this page has become a dinosaur. Being in the tech industry, I was an early adopter of MP3′s and digital music. As a DJ, it makes life much easier as you don’t have to carry around cases of CDs. So I am well aware of how CDs are giving way to the era of online digital music. No matter how much the music industry wants to protect their control of music distribution and keep them stocked in stores, the CD is going the way of the 8-track. What has surprised me is the extent and speed that CDs are becoming antiquated. When I tell people asking about practice music to go to a page of CDs, I now almost always get asked about online sources or music on iTunes. This would seem logical if I was talking about the younger generation, but this has been true across almost all age demographics. It seems the majority of people don’t want CDs anymore and demand digital downloads.

So why am I still linking to CDs? I guess I didn’t realized the extent to which they are dying off. Going forward I will start providing links to iTunes. After all, it is the  #2 music retailer in the US. However, I will still provide some links back to CDs. Not that I’m grasping onto a dying technology, but, I believe in supporting independent swing and jazz artists. Many of these artists still rely on CD sales and I believe we should support their livelihood. However, I think we should encourage them to offer their music for sale in online stores such as iTunes. Hopefully this will further advance their music sales and give them the ability to keep doing what they do best.