I was at my friend Jojo’s house about a year and a half ago, watching some old VHS tapes of dance stuff she had. Among the home movies she had was a taped documentary featuring Cab Calloway. He was checking out this amazing cartoon map of Harlem from back in the 30’s and remembering all the places. Since then I’ve been trying to find a readable copy of it. A while ago I found that the title is “A Nightclub Map of Harlem” and it was drawn in 1932 by E. Simms Campbell, a cartoonist who went on to great success with his drawings in Ebony Magazine. My searches for it turned up little that was actually legible — until this week. Check out the link to view a closeup on Flickr:

A Nightclub Map of Harlem, by E. Simms Campbell

I love the great depictions of Harlemites and the little comments everywhere… “Specializes in fried chicken – and it’s really good!” … “Nothing happens before 2 a.m. Ask for Clarence.” Cab Calloway made a joking comment about what a deal those marijuana cigarettes seemed at the time of filming, “2 for $.25″.

Unfortunately it seems that every copy I’ve seen is cropped on every side so we are missing a portion of this great work. My new side project is to find the original drawing and get the rights to print it as a poster. It might even be in the public domain, depending on whether rights were renewed. How great would it be to have this framed up on your wall?

As far as I can tell, the last place the original was shown was at an exhibit at the Smithsonian in 1996. I’m hoping that it is still there; I’ll post updates if I make any progress!

I read that Life Magazine has put about 20% of their photos online via Google (with plans for 100% in the next few months), and I immediately thought of the great Lindy Hop photos from the 40’s featuring Leon James, Willamae Ricker, Stanley Catron, and Kaye Popp.

The simplest search revealed all the photos available from the session, which includes many not featured in the original magazine.

I then recalled the earlier feature on Frankie Manning, where if memory serves me, a reporter went to a bar where he happened to be dancing and snapped this photo.

Here are some more quick searches I did:

Savoy Ballroom, which features a cool costume contest.

Swing Dancing

Jitterbug

Comment with any other interesting searches you can find!

I occasionally keep an eye on Ebay for vintage sheet music, dance programs, and other jazz related stuff.  Here are a couple of Savoy Ballroom related items I picked up recently:

Images of the inside of the Savoy that aren’t of the dance floor are harder to come by. I do find it kind of odd that the focus of the painting is the ugly chairs and that the view of the dance floor is blocked. You can make out the side-by-side bandstands in the back though.

Here is a cool advertisement I found in a fancy dance program. It was titled “Harriman Democratic Club Spring Festival and Dance” and was held at the Audubon Ballroom, Sunday Evening May 19th, 1957. The program is full of pictures of the members of the club, advertisements from local Manhattan businesses, and little else. I’m kind of surprised at how well put together (and hefty!) the program is. 120 pages, printing in blue, black, and silver ink. I think I may remove the Savoy page and frame it.

Here’s the detail of the ad. Love the design. Looks like it was a larger ad that they scaled down for this. I think it’s supposed to say something below the dancers but the print size makes it impossible to make out. At least we can make out “The Home of Happy Feet”!

After my laptop’s 5th death and complete reinstall, I can finally get my thoughts out, even if they are a few weeks old.

You know a dance weekend is good when you hear three different people independently exclaim “I love my life!” in the midst of the weekend’s events. Stompology 2008 was kind of a dream come true for us on almost every level: the music was out of this world, the classes were top notch, and the parties were awesome. Unlike previous years, I didn’t worry myself with videotaping everything for a vaporware DVD, and I was able to actually enjoy the weekend as a result. The only thing that could have been better is that we just barely squeaked out a tiny profit. We all kind of expected this though, as we spent way more money this year than previous years. If we had to do it all over again though, I wouldn’t have tried to do anything differently since the event itself was so awesome.

The highlight of the weekend for a lot of people was the late night on Friday, in which Gordon Webster teamed up with George Reed and the amazing Wycliffe Gordon. I told Gordon after the show that it was the best night of music that we’ve had in town, ever. I wasn’t exaggerating.

The weekend was also a big deal for me because of the great Sunday night pool party hosted by Corinne and Colin. It marked the first time in more than a decade that I played my saxophone in front of people. Mike and Andy played guitar, Colin and Ryan played drums, Steve played upright bass, and Naomi sang. I was really shy about joining in at first, but after warming up on the kazoo for a couple of songs, I figured what the heck. We played On the Sunny Side of the Street and Perdido, and it was a lot of fun. The problem I have is that I need to have sheet music in front of me in order to play. I can fool around and improvise a little bit, but I don’t really know what I’m doing. I can sightread pretty well, but I have always lacked the ability to translate the ideas in my head and sounds in my ears to movements of my fingers. It’s definitely something that I want to improve upon, and Sunday night definitely made me want to practice and pretty much play all the time.

What will next year’s Stompology bring? One thing I’d really like to see is more dancers. Mike commented both this year and last that he was surprised more people didn’t flock to this event since it was the only one of its kind. I think I initially thought the same way but I guess it could be considered a bit of a niche market, even though traditional jazz movement forms the basis of Lindy Hop. Alex and I have both talked about how awesome it would be if Stompology got big enough to allow tracks, but one good thing we currently have is a nice intimate feel to the weekend, and I think it’s something that Rochester always has during dance events. I think we could still keep that feeling even if we grew bigger.

Coming off of back to back workshops in town (the very successful Northeast Girl Jam was at the end of April) it will be nice for us to take a bit of a break before hosting the 11^th Annual Steven and Virginie weekend in November. I’m looking forward to not having heavy-duty planning for at least a little while.