Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Swing, R&B & Ballroom at an Asian Wedding for 600!

Asian brides and grooms are often afraid that the guests at their weddings won’t dance, but that never happens to our bands!

Why? Because we set tempos people can dance to. The guests realize immediately that they can trust us, and before long they are gliding around the floor like pros. And some of the guests at a recent Asian wedding for 600 we performed for actually were pros.

They especially enjoyed ballroom dancing: rhumbas, cha cha’s, waltzes, foxtrots and lindys. Some were really accomplished swing dancers.

Right before the DJ was to take over, the crowd decided our little jazz quartet to play “The Chicken Dance” instead of waiting for the DJ to play it.

Huh?

So of course the band played it. For twenty minutes. BIG hit!

There isn’t a recording in the world that can keep “The Chicken Dance” going for twenty minutes — or speed it up as fast as we did at the end. We do the same thing with the hora…more about that another time….

After that, there was no going back to standards, jazz, ballroom or even swing.

They wanted “YMCA.” The DJ didn’t have it. So the band played that, too. For about a half hour – or at least it seemed like a half hour.

I’ve added “The Chicken Dance” to our song list.

And I think we are now qualified to perform “YMCA “better than The Village People.

Hey, we’re real musicians! We can do things CD’s can’t.

And no, we don’t have a video of it.

Because you’re supposed to get rid of something when you add something, I decided to remove “Brick House” and “Celebration” from our list. So cheesy.

I did leave “I Will Survive” and “Copacabana” on the list. I love those tunes!

Just, please….don’t ask us to play “The Macarena.”

We don’t know the words!

Bandleader Judy Chamberlain once played “YMCA” three times in the same night for revelers at a New Year’s Eve party who claimed the song was their ‘club anthem.’