LET'S DANCE!

Arranger/conductor: Peter Stöve

This is not your average bigband! This is Lindy Hop Music pur sang. Bernard Berkhout recreates
the incredible sound that in 1935 conquered America in only a few months and formed the basis
for all bigband jazz to follow. When you talk 'Swing', this is it!
With its original size - only 4 saxophones, 3 trumpets and 2 trombones - this band sounds like
a light chambre-music ensemble. With the Swingmates as its rhythm section, plenty of solo's
and Berkhout's clarinet-playing, it swings like hell!
This is the music of New deal America, never again was jazz so popular and never again was
pop-music so sophisticated. It was with this music that American youth danced itself free from
the claws of depression.

IIn 1934, when times were getting rough for radio musicians, Benny Goodman met a golden
opportunity: Sponsorship for founding a danceband. He obtained Fletcher Henderson's bandbook
and made his musicians play the arrangements as accurate and swinging as had never been done before. After F.D. Roosevelt had become President in 1933, Repeal and New Deal created new opportunities for dancehalls and bars. America's youth, for years kept inside by poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity, came out and danced anytime everywhere. The twentieth century saw it's first Pop Culture. The name Benny Goodman stand for this era.