Setlist from First Friday at Big City Swing

Last Friday was another jam-packed evening at Big City Swing--two lessons on two floors, and a good crowd that stuck around 'til we had to kick them out. Mary and I taught a hand-to-hand Charleston lesson (downstairs) while Jenna and Max taught an intro swing lesson (upstairs), both of which had probably close to 30 people.

Then starting at 8:45, my friend Thea did a set downstairs while Nathan spun upstairs. I mostly hung out downstairs, but checked in on the other floor once or twice. For whatever reason, the upstairs was consistently more crowded than downstairs (the opposite of what happened last month). I took over downstairs at 10:00, and it remained on the chill side until 11:00 when upstairs closed for the evening and everyone trooped back down and the room got crowded again.

As far as my set, I'd say it wasn't my best. My djing program, Disco XT, was acting up on my new laptop--it clunked out on my about 15 minutes in, so I had to finish the night in iTunes, flying blind without preview capability. (Like I mentioned in the last post, more thoughts on DJ software coming up soon.) I think I had a hard time finding the right vibe for the room, and I also relied too much on Dixie/New Orleans-sounding music, which is really becoming my crutch. Here's the setlist:

1. Cabaret - Louis Armstrong - Louis Armstrong - 3:59 - 155
2. Gotta Be This Or That - Benny Goodman - Benny Goodman '45 & '47 - 3:10 - 140
3. All Of Me - Della Reese - Cocktail Classics - 2:01 - 160
   (Disco XT freezes on me.)
   
4. Could'Ja - Nat King Cole - The Magic of Nat King Cole - 3:01 - 110
   (Next song was by request, which I am usually happy to take, but this song sure was LOOOONG....)
   
5. Frim Fram Sauce - Diana Krall - All For You: A Dedication To The Nat King Cole Trio - 5:00 - 115
6. I Got an Uncle In Harlem - Hot Lips Page - Legends of Harlem - 3:09 - 145
   (The last song didn't take, and the next one had a mislabeled bpm. Since I couldn't preview, I mistook it for a different, slower track. Whoops. Jenna made me dance with her just so that the floor wouldn't be totally empty.)
   
7. Oh Lady Be Good - Stuff Smith Quartet - Hot Stuff - 4:15 - 200
8. My Bucket's Got a Hole In It - Louis Armstrong - An Evening With Louis Armstrong And His All Stars - 4:24 - 145
9. It's You Who Taught It To Me - Fats Waller - The Unique Mr. Waller - 2:42 - 160
   (Someone invariably requests a shim-sham at First Fridays. Which I think is cool.)
   
10. Tain't What You Do - Jimmie Lunceford - Jimmie Lunceford - 3:06 - 160
11. Hoodle-Addle - Ray McKinley Orchestra - You Came A Long Way From St. Louis - 3:21 - 140
12. Louisiana - Barney Kessel - To Swing Or Not To Swing - 3:56 - 140
13. Way Down Yonder In New Orleans - Bill Coleman - Bill Coleman In Paris 1936-1938 - 3:17 - 175
14. A Viper's Moan - Willie Bryant And His Orchestra - 1935-1936 - 3:25 - 150
15. Easy Does It - Paul Tillotson the Love Trio - Lindy Hop Blues - 2:57 - 130
16. At Long Last Love - Bill Henderson - Bill Henderson With the Oscar Peterson Trio - 2:30 - 130
17. Some of These Days - Billie & DeDe Pierce - Gulf Coast Blues - 2:38 - 150
18. Georgia Grind - Louis Armstrong - Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography Disc 1 - 3:19 - 115
    (The upstairs crowd started coming in during Georgia Grind.)
    
19. Take It Easy Greasy No. 2 - Lil Johnson - Lil Johnson & Barrelhouse Annie Vol. 3 1937 - 2:58 - 145
20. Perdido Street Blues - Louis Armstrong - The Complete Decca Studio Master Takes 1940-1949 - 3:08 - 145
21. Gang Busters - Cats & The Fiddle - We Cats Will Swing For You - 3:06 - 185
22. Sugar Blues - Clarence Williams - Boogie Woogie Blues - 3:40 - 135
    (Haven't played Sugar Blues in a while--people seemed to be pretty into it.)
    
23. Old Mother Hubbard - Ella Fitzgerald - Swingin' Ella - 2:44 - 145
24. For Dancers Only - John Lewis, The American Jazz Orchestra - The Music Of Jimmie Lunceford - 4:34 - 145
25. I'm Coming Virginia - Benny Goodman - The Yale University Archives, Volume 3: Big Band In Europe - 2:09 - 170
26. Who Walks In When I Walk Out? with Ella Fitzgerald - Louis Armstrong - The Wonderful Duets - 2:21 - 135
27. Peckin' - Duke Ellington - The Duke's Men: The Small Groups, Vol. 1 - 3:09 - 160
28. A Smo-o-oth One - Benny Goodman - Benny Goodman - 3:16 - 130
29. Careless Love - The Storyville Jassband - Storyville Jubilee - 3:29 - 100
30. San Francisco Bay Blues - Lu Watters' Yerba Buena Jazz Band - Blues Over Bodega - 3:41 - 160
    (Next one was for Max.)
    
31. Jazz Battle - Jabbo Smith - 1929 - The Complete Set - 2:43 - 250
32. Wake Up Neesie - Kermit Ruffins - Big Easy - 5:50 - 130
33. Blues For Ella - Thilo Berg Big Band and Barbara Morrison - Blues For Ella -Live- - 4:35 - 110
    (I thought that ending the night on a slow, groovy note would be appreciated--thinking of Monday Night Practices in Boston, where the last song was ALWAYS Lou Rawls...)
    
34. St. James Infirmary - Lou Rawls - Lou Rawls: Live! - 4:34 - 115
    (But my hunch was wrong. People danced to St. James Infirmary, but they seemed more interested in the Fats Waller that was the really last song of the night.)
    
35. Twenty-Four Robbers - Fats Waller - The Unique Mr. Waller - 2:45 - 190
    (Followed by please-go-home music.)
    
36. Rollout (My Business) - Ludacris - Word of Mouf - 4:56
37. Mami Me Gusto - Todos Estrellas - Putumayo Presents: Cuba - 4:35

Disco XT to iTunes: another nifty little AppleScript

Here's yet another AppleScript that swing DJs might find useful. Disco XT is a software program (now available for Mac and PC) that I, and from what I hear, many other swing DJs, use to play our sets. It's my first choice because it:

• reads my iTunes library,
• works with dual audio output, so I can preview songs in my headphones while playing a different tune over the main speakers, and
• automatically loads songs from a cue and transitions between songs.

It also keeps a log of every song played. I like to save all my DJ sets as iTunes playlists, so I wrote an AppleScript that will pull a Disco XT playlist back in to iTunes. The program is a little bit kluggy because you can't copy directly from a Disco XT log file--you have to export it as text first. So to use the script, you need to do the following in order:

1. Play a set using Disco XT.
2. When you're done, export your log to a text file.
   
3. Open that file.
4. Highlight the songs that you want to copy into iTunes and hit apple-C to copy.
5. Open your iTunes and run this script.
6. A new playlist called "Disco XT playlist" will be generated. Since Disco only allows you to export the title and artist of the tracks that you played, there is no way to uniquely identify a track if you happen to have multiple versions (for instance, your 6 different recordings of the Basie band playing One O'Clock Jump). The script pulls all of them, so you'll need to look through the playlist and delete the tracks that you didn't actually play.

If anyone has suggestions for improving the AppleScript code below, please feel free to share. Or if you have a better way of doing the same task that doesn't use an AppleScript at all, I'd love to hear it.

Here's the code:

tell application "Finder" to set theClipboard to the clipboard
set saveD to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return
set tempList to every text item of theClipboard
set theImportList to {}
repeat with lineItem in tempList
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {" - "}
copy every text item of lineItem to end of theImportList
end repeat
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to saveD


tell application "iTunes"
-- create a new playlist
make new user playlist with properties {name:"Disco XT playlist"}
set newPlaylist to playlist "Disco XT playlist"
set the view of the front browser window to newPlaylist

-- add tracks to new playlist
repeat with trackItem in theImportList
set copy_these to (get every track of library playlist 1 whose artist is (first item of trackItem) and name is (second item of trackItem))
repeat with thisTrack in copy_these
duplicate thisTrack to newPlaylist
end repeat
end repeat
end tell

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