Electro Swing Club Comes to Toronto

Electro swing is a fusion of swing — a jazz style first heard in the 1930s (think Benny Goodman and Count Basie) — and modern electronic music that descended from jazz and the blues, such as hip-hop, drum and bass, funk and dubstep. Here are some samples:

Electro Swing Club is a loose federation of clubs and event organizers who like electro swing and put together electro swing-themed events all over the world. They’ve had Electro Swing Club nights in the places you’d suspect: Paris, London, Prague and Hollywood, but they’ve also had them in Utrecht, Antwerp, Torino, Montreal, Vancouver, and as of a couple of Fridays ago, Accordion City.

Anitra was visiting Accordion City at the time, and she found the Electro Swing Club event at the Gladstone while looking for stuff to do online. She’s a swing dancer and I love electronic music, so it seemed like the perfect evening out. The announcement for the event mentioned that there was a sliding scale for admission, with admission being lower for people who dressed the part. I don’t have a zoot suit anymore, but I still dressed up and took Anitra to an appropriately retro place for dinner: The Lakeview…

…and then it was off to the Gladstone!

In addition to a DJ spinning the electro swing tunes, we were also treated to Rambunctious, Accordion City’s brass jam band made up of a dozen players of various persuasions of horn and a drummer. I know their frontman, Michael Johnson, from Kickass Karaoke — he and I have played together on Istanbul (not Constantinople), with him on trumpet and me playing you-know-what. He even paused for a moment, said “Hey!” and waved my way when he saw me, which is always a good thing when you’re taking a girl out on a date and trying to impress her — and besides, it only helps to perpetuate the myth that I’m connected to everybody. In my line of work, that’s a good thing.

Rambunctious don’t play any set pieces; they improvise. Michael would call out to the audience to give him a name for the next piece, and then someone in the band would start a riff and they’d build on it until everyone was contributing. Michael would make up vocals on the spot based on the suggested title. That night, they ended up performing numbers named “23 Skidoo” (a slang term from the era), “No Love at the Pharmacy”, “Brass Baby”, and the piece I recorded below, “Fish Legs”:

They didn’t just stay on stage either…

…they hopped out into the audience and we had a grand old time.

We were even treated to a solo from the rhythm section: a baritone sax player and a lingerie-clad drummer. I managed to get a clear shot of the baritone sax player, but I’m going to have to disappoint you fans of female drummers in skimpy clothes — I was too far away and my shots are a bit blurry:

Then came the burlesque act. The dancer followed a simple formula: dancing, balloons, cigarette…

…and you know what happens when you press the lit end of a cancer stick to a balloon!

So when are we having the next one?