Welcome Judy! JudyB became our fifteenth dance-caller-blogger last week!
Over the weekend, Chicory played a dance Champaign-Urbana with Bill Sudkamp, a fine caller from Chicago. Bill has been calling for umpteen years, and has a reputation as an excellent square dance caller (in addition to being a good contra caller) and frankly, I was a bit worried that he wouldn't like us all that much because he really likes old-time music, and my bands mostly play in a kind of New England, contra fusion style.
But I made friends with him at Kimmswick, when he looked over at Stringdancer and said "Oh, I guess I should call a contra," and I said "We can play old time square dance music, you know. We can even play fast." He grinned and said "Okay, then." We played so fast that I'm still getting complaints from dancers several months after the dance, but Bill was happy, so we were happy too.
This time he said (with a twinkle), "You don't have to play quite that fast..."
Bill was smart. He figured out that he could call a "Chestnut" and a strange but fun five-part dance because, as long as we have the written music, the band can play just about anything. The Chestnut was "Chorus Jig," famous for being neither a chorus nor a jig (and for being one of the first dances to use contra corners), and the five part dance had 80 counts instead of the usual 64!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment