[Dixielandjazz] Set Lists

[Larry Walton Entertainment - St. Louis]

I think the key to set lists is weather or not you can be flexible.  A dinner set is a completely different animal to a dance set.  You don't have to be particularly flexible with a dinner set.  Mickey bands usually do five tune sets and there is always a Waltz, Polka or Latin in the set.  Sometimes two but Mickey bands never do belly rubbers that were popular in the 50's.  They may do the tune but they don't do the tempos the same.  They will take a tune like Tenderly and take the tempo from @80 up to 120 or so. But that's another thing.

Some bands do two up tempo then a slow tune or whatever formula the band leader has worked out.  The key is flexibility.  A leader I work for isn't very flexible and will continue with his list even though it isn't working very well and for some strange reason if it is working well he will change it.  I could never figure that one out but as time goes by he doesn't do that as often as he did five years ago.

Someone made a comment about changing keys.  I know that does make a tune more interesting sometimes but I fail to see that it makes any difference if a tune is in a particular key and the next tune is in the same key.  I don't think that the general public has a clue.  Personally I wouldn't take that into consideration at all.

There are some guys (I'm not one) that have great recall as to what tune is what number.  I tend to forget if we have played a tune or not but I really don't care for lists much but it is a solution.

I played with a traveling band that came through and they had everything in pre arranged sets and they had been playing this order for years.  They did have tunes off on the other side of the book as specials.  They had Polkas, Cha Chas etc. to throw in but everything else was set.  They did start in different sections though.  The second hour might start with set number 35, 40 etc and the third hour might start with set 15 and sometimes if a request came in for a tune in set 32 we would do that set then back to the order.  It seemed to work for them and it went very smooth but I couldn't stick to a thing like that.

Larry Walton
St. Louis