Anyone who’s taken my jazz classes recently knows I’m on a huge Bob Fosse kick (it all started when I began looking for inspiration for my new Beatnik routines, my current pet project). Nah, not 1970s “Spirit Fingers” Fosse, but the way cooler 1950s Fosse. Here’s one of my favourite clips at the moment, I’ll be definitely drawing on this for my Beatnik number! It’s Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse dancing in Damn Yankees (1958):

Anyway, I stumbled across this newspaper clipping from 2000, what a treat! As a dancer, you can only dream that one day your poses and silhouettes could be as recognisable as Fosse’s…

As promised, I’m posting up all the video clips that I referenced during my Stompology 2010 classes. Once the class reviews and performances appear online, I’ll post those videos as well, so you can compare! So here we go…

Ballin’ The Jack, choreographed by Gene Kelly for a television special (with Donald O’Connor) in 1960:

And here are the numbers that inspired my Beatnik Routine! Firstly…

Steam Heat, from the film The Pajama Game (1957), with dancers Eddie Phillips, Carol Haney and Buzz Miller, choreographed by Bob Fosse:

Gwen Verdon singing Whatever Lola Wants, from Damn Yankees (1958), choreographed by Bob Fosse. Fun fact, Gwen Verdon was Bob Fosse’s wife!

Hand Jive with the Johnny Otis Band (1959):

Audrey Hepburn dancing in Funny Face (1957):

Here is colour 16mm footage (no sound) from the 1939 production of The Hot Mikado, at the New York World’s Fair. The musical was an all-black adaptation of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado, with jazzy tunes, big-name performers and famous dancers, including Bill Bojangles Robinson and the Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers:

Can you believe those costumes!?

If you want to find out more about the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and see more colour footage, I posted about it here.

Here’s that snippet of a black couple dancing in the 1944 film Go Down Death that I mentioned to some people recently. Juan stumbled across a compilation clip someone had thrown together on YouTube, and the first half of it was all vintage burlesque from Harlem, so he was showing it to me to see if I had seen it before (I had), but then this little gem popped up at the end, what a treasure!  It’s a fairly rare thing that I find a vintage clip of swing dancing that I haven’t seen before, so it was a nice little thrill. Still haven’t figured out who the dancers are, their style looks like they’re from the West Coast. Also haven’t got my hands on the film to get the full clip with the original sound yet, working on that. It’s available on Amazon I believe. She’s great, love her style…

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:

Definitely one of my great idols, she had the most beautiful lines with her graceful ballerina’s legs. If Cyd Charisse was the womanly femme fatale, Vera-Ellen was sweet, innocent, childlike, even a little goofy. She combined classical ballet and pointe work, with the 1940s style “American ballet”, ballrooming, tap, vernacular jazz and blues movement, acrobatics and even toe tap. She had the tiniest waist in Hollywood at the time. Check out Vera-Ellen dancing in these films, alongside the likes of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Danny Kaye:

Wonder Man (1945), The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), Three Little Girls in Blue (1946), Carnival in Costa Rica (1947), Words and Music (1948), Love Happy (1949), On the Town (1949), Three Little Words (1950), Happy Go Lovely (1951), The Belle of New York (1952), Call Me Madam (1953), Big Leaguer (1953), White Christmas (1954), and Let’s Be Happy (1957).

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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.

If you ask ‘Who was the greatest flash act of the 1940s?’, a lot of people might suggest The Nicholas Brothers. Ok, fair enough. But I stumbled across a pretty wild clip of some high-kicking, full-splitting and fast-flipping ladies who show that it wasn’t just the lads pulling out the flash back in the day. So, I give you first the Nicholas Brothers dancing to the tune Jumpin’ Jive, with Cab Calloway in the 1943 film Stormy Weather…

And secondly, I give you the Jumpin’ Jive Girls, in the film Sensations of 1945. You’ll also see Eleanor Powell, with a live horse! Enjoy…

Well, the lyrics may be wildly politically incorrect these days, but Nagasaki is in my opinion a slammin’ little jazz tune. I’ve got renditions I love by Django Reinhardt, Adrian Rollini, Gene Krupa, Benny Carter, Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, Putney Dandridge, Willie Lewis & His Entertainers,  and earlier this year some of you may have learned a jazz routine I choreographed to a hot version by Ondrej Havelka & His Melodymakers.

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.

I just stumbled across this clip of Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire dancing ‘The Shorty George’ in the movie You Were Never Lovelier (1942). A nice, if slightly odd, little tribute to one of our legends, George “Shorty” Snowden. George was a first generation Lindy Hopper at the Savoy Ballroom, and not only created the jazz step that bears his name – The Shorty George – but legend has it, he’s the one that gave Lindy Hop its name too.

Here is (the real) Shorty George dancing with his partner, Big Bea:

And I just uploaded a high-res version of After Seben (1929) to YouTube. Shorty George is the third dancer, announced as ‘Shorty Stumps”. The emcee (in blackface) is James Barton: