I got asked three times recently, where the name of our team The Killer Dillers comes from.

The phrase “killer diller” is jazz slang, in common use in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. To be a “killer” or a “killer diller” meant you were red hot, back in the day. So if you’re a Killer Diller you got chops, you’re gangbusters, you’re really the cat’s meow. Dig it?

The phrase can be heard in lyrics sung by the likes of Cab Calloway, Slim & Slam, Fats Waller, The Cats & The Fiddle, and Benny Goodman even played a tune called Killer Diller in his historic concert in Carnegie Hall in 1938.

Killer Diller was also the name of a film made in 1948 that, amongst other things, featured famed Lindy Hop troupe The Congaroos (including the late and great Frankie Manning) performing a fast and wildly acrobatic number that has gone down in swing dance history as one of the greatest ever. Here is that scene:

Oh, and the Urban Dictionary defines a Killer Diller as “Something so cool there are no other words to describe it.” That’s fine with us.

Photos: Red Nichols (left), Bob Howard (right)

At The Clambake Carnival, Cab Calloway, 186 bpm
Nice Work If You Can Get It, Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra with Billie Holiday, 1937, 165 bpm
You’ve Got To Give Me Some, Clarence Williams, 185 bpm
Ballin’ The Jack, Red Nichols, 131 bpm
Dark Rapture, Count Basie with Helen Humes, 1938, 161 bpm
I’ll Always Be In Love With You, Horace Henderson & His Orchestra, 1940, 175 bpm
Getting Some Fun Out Of Life, Billie Holiday, 1937, 113 bpm
I’m Living In A Great Big Way, Benny Goodman & His Orchestra, 1935, 168 bpm
Exactly Like You, Don Redman & His Orchestra, 1937, 154 bpm
I’m Crazy ‘Bout My Baby, Louis Armstrong, 1955, 163 bpm
Swingmatism, Jay McShann & His Orchestra, 1941, 178 bpm
Cross Patch, Fats Waller, 139 bpm
Spring Cleaning, Bob Howard, 171 bpm
Roses of Picardy, Tchavolo Schmitt, 2005, 124 bpm
The Good Drag (Gone Wid de Goon), Sam Price & His Texas Blusicians, 139 bpm
Little Jazz, Roy Eldridge, 1945, 145 bpm
Fan It, Red Nichols, 181 bpm
Shorty’s Got To Go, Lucky Millinder, 1946, 146 bpm
Coleslaw, Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five, 1949, 136 bpm
G-Men, Cootie Williams & His Orchestra, 1941, 162 bpm
Ridin’ and Jivin’, Earl Hines, 1939, 150 bpm
Blue Drag, Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grapelli, 114 bpm

As promised to my gorgeous London students tonight, here are the songs for the two choreographies I am teaching in London over the next three weeks. These are the whole songs, and I may edit them down to be shorter for the next two lessons, but you can practice to these in the meantime!

Download ‘Lucy Brown’ by the Larks (Jazz & Charleston)

Download ‘Golden Wedding’ by Woody Herman (Josephine Baker)

Watch this video for homework!

See you next week!

This weekend in Munich for the Rock That Swing Festival, Juan and I taught a class of moves from the Harvest Moon Ball. As promised, here is the footage I showed at the beginning of class. It’s a compilation I put together of a bunch of the surviving footage, overlaid with a recording of The Wolverines Big Band playing live for the Liberation division at the Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown in 2004, neat huh?

If you’re not sure what the Harvest Moon Ball was all about, here’s a quick history:

The Harvest Moon Ball was an amateur dance contest held in New York City, in August or September each year from 1935 to 1974.  It was sponsored by the Daily News.

The very first Harvest Moon Ball contest was actually held in 1927 in the Central Park Mall, but when 75,000 people showed up to watch the contest, the organisers postponed future contests in the hope of finding a larger venue. Another attempt in 1934 was officially shut down by then Mayor La Guardia, for being a public safety risk. So the official first Harvest Moon Ball contest is considered to be the 1935 competition held in Madison Square Gardens.

The contest was not only a Lindy Hop contest, but included other dance divisions including Rumba, Foxtrot, Polka, Tango, Collegiate Shag, Viennese Waltz, a Serviceman’s Division, and later even the Hustle. There was also an “All Round Champions” prize awarded, which usually went to the winners of the Foxtrot division. However, the Lindy Hop division (later called the Jitterbug Jive division, and then the Rock ‘n Roll division), was the most spectacular and particularly popular with audiences and press.

To compete in the contest, there were preliminary rounds held in ballrooms starting in August, including the Savoy and Roseland Ballrooms. Contestants for the finals were selected by three judges.

The finals were held in Madison Square Gardens, where the 20,000 seats typically sold out within days of going on sale. Big name celebrities and famous Hollywood actors often attended, and Ed Sullivan was the emcee for most of the earlier contests. The winners were selected by a panel of five judges, and were awarded sponsored prizes and a contract to perform at one or more Loews State Theatres, thus making them professional dancers.

The contest was held in Madison Square Gardens from 1935 to 1974. When the Savoy Ballroom closed in 1958, Louise “Mama Lu” Parks promised the Savoy Ballroom manager Charles Buchanan, to continue to organise the Lindy Hop preliminaries, which were thereafter held in the Savoy Manor hall in the Bronx. In 1979 when the official Harvest Moon Ball organisers dropped the Lindy Hop division from the competition (in favour of dances like The Hustle), Mama Lu turned her preliminaries into the main Lindy Hop contest, which continued until 1989, in various venues. The final official Harvest Moon Ball contest was held in 1984, so the Lindy Hop division of Harvest Moon Ball outlasted the event itself, thanks to Mama Lu Parks.

Here are a few photos of the event program for the 1943 Harvest Moon Ball:

And here is an article in the October 2nd, 1950 issue of LIFE Magazine about the Harvest Moon Ball. Click on the image to see a larger version, or click here to read the full article.

The Savoy Ballroom dominance is pretty easy to see! And that’s a great whos-who list of dancers. You’ll see some of our favourites, that Juan and I mention a lot, like Sandra Gibson, Blue Outlaw, and Tops & Wilder, and of course you know Leon James, Al Minns, and living legend Sugar Sullivan.

But there’s some names in there that just don’t get enough recognition in the swing world today. Like Edith Matthews, who won with Leon James in 1935, is the lady who (legend has it) invented swivels on counts 1 and 2 of a swingout. She was better known as the partner of “Twistmouth” George Ganaway, yeah that’s the guy that discovered the young Norma Miller on the sidewalk outside the Savoy Ballroom. And George Grenidge and Ella Gibson, the 1936 winners, you can see dancing in A Day At The Races.  Russell Williams & Connie Hill, the 1939 champions, are the dancers in that 1943 Cootie Williams & His Orchestra soundie, and Russell Williams dances with Willa Mae Ricker alongside Frankie Manning & Ann Johnson in the Congaroos performance in the film Killer Diller.

Anyway, my whole point was, if you want to learn to dance like that, check us out on iDance.net:

Anyway, amongst a few other fun concerts (dancing on concrete in the open air), the real standout was a night of SERIOUS jazz manouche, with the Angelo Debarre & Ludovic Beier Trio, supported by Buenos Aires gypsy jazz band, Swing Tzigane. Angelo Debarre (gypsy guitar) and Ludovic Beier (accordian) are the REAL DEAL!! These are the guys keeping Django’s spirit alive. Watching them play from my second row theatre seat was both pure agony (they swung hard, sitting still was frustrating) and sheer bliss (I didn’t want to take my eyes off their fingering – the speed! the precision! the range!).

A snippet from the festival programme:

This trio constitutes one of the most exquisite and fresh expressions of the powerful manouche tradition, bound to the legacy of the great Django. From Gus Viseur to Jo Privat, from Ferré to Reinhardt, accordion and manouche guitar have made an excellent couple. It will come as no surprise, then, that the gathering of Ludovic Beier and Angelo Debarre, with the added plus of an impeccable rhythm section led by Tchavolo Hassan, should turn into a manouche extravaganza. Virtuosity, accordion fluency, accuracy, colour and the instantly identifiable personality of the guitar: the fusion of these results in sheer brilliance.

Instead of trying to describe how wonderful it was, I’m just going to let them speak for themselves. Here are a few clips I filmed on the night. Firstly, the Buenos Aires group Swing Tzigane, who are really wonderful, love that fiddle! Tzigane is another name for gypsy (also Manouche, Romanichel, Bohemian, Zingari, etc.). They are playing the tune Avalon:

Next we have the French trio, with lead guitarist Angelo Debarre, accordionist Ludovic Beier and rhythm guitarist Tchavolo Hassan:

And finally, the international Trio joined by Swing Tzigane in an impromptu rendition of Minor Swing:

Ahh, heaven!

www.myspace.com/angelodebarre
www.ludovicbeier.moonfruit.fr
www.myspace.com/ludovicbeier

I just got pointed towards a snippet of footage of the late great Frank Manning, social dancing in the Savoy Ballroom in 1937!  I have so much vintage footage in my collection (over 2,000 short clips on my laptop alone), that sometimes it seems impossible that I could ever stumble across another gem.  Actually, it happens all the time, but rarely this wonderful. I know it’s only a few seconds of Frankie, but he looks so young and happy, and I was just delighted to see footage of the bandstand in the Savoy Ballroom (I’d only seen photos). And the girls swinging out, in full-length ballgowns!!  Wow, just so wonderful!

The footage is from Time Inc’s newsreel, The March of Time, on  February 19, 1937. This was a current affairs newsreel, shown in cinemas before the main feature (remember, this is before television). HBO is restoring all that archival footage, good for them! That particular ‘episode’ happens to be about swing music as a ‘current trend’. You can see Frankie dancing in “dark Harlem’s hot and noisy Savoy” at 0:46.

And I’m a big fan of this Reds & Struggs performance of the tune:

And here’s The Four Step Brothers getting their Nagasaki on, in a barber shop:

And here’s my Frenchy buddy and fellow SwingFashionista Alice Mei, with Thomas Blacharz, performing a routine to the tune at the International Lindy Hop Championships this year:

And a team routine choreographed by my very good friend and fellow Killer Diller, Kevin St Laurent, for a team of hard-swingin’ Lithuanians:

And finally (because I know you’re all dying to learn the words), here are some of the lyrics I’ve heard sung before. Some of them are pretty dirty, sorry…

Hot ginger and dynamite
There’s nothing but that at night
Back in Nagasaki
Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky-wacky woo.

The way they can entertain
Would hurry a hurricane
Back in Nagasaki
Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky  woo.

In Fujiama
You get a mama
Then your troubles increase.
In some pagoda
She orders soda
Earth-shake milk-shakes, ten cents a piece.

They kissy and huggy nice
By Jingo! It’s worth the price.
Back in Nagasaki
Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky-wacky woo.

They give you a carriage free
The horse is a Japanee
Back in Nagasaki
Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky-wacky woo.

They sit you upon the floor
And splinter you galore
Back in Nagasaki
Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky-wacky
 woo.

With Sweet Kimoner
I pulled a boner
I kept it up at high speed.
I got rhumatics
And then psyatics
Halatosisis, that’s guaranteed.

You just have to act your age
Or wind up inside a cage
Back in Nagasaki
Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky-wacky 
woo.

Those pretty mamas
In pink pyjamas
They try to give you a kiss
Those torid teases
In B.V.D.ses
Heaven help a sailor on a night like this!

When the girls Ju Jitsu
Seems like a bus hit you
Back in Nagasaki
Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky-wacky woo.

Not too gentle and not too rough
But you’ve got to tell them when you’ve had enough
Back in Nagasaki
Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky-wacky woo.

From its very inception, jazz and the devil were thrown into the same basket (like this 1921 article and this 1938 news story).  Well, I’m not a religious person, and quite frankly hell for me would be a world without jazz, but anyway, the imagery linking hot jazz and that world of fire and brimstone is a fairly common one.  The film Cabin in the Sky comes to mind, and I must have seen this little cartoon a hundred times when I was a kid: The Three Little Bops, Looney Tunes 1957:

And along the animated theme, a little more recently, from Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride in 2005:

The photo at the top of the post is Lee Presson & The Nails, because Lee is the first person I could think of who would sing in a jazz club in hell. Enjoy!