Jeff Kaufman's Writing

Dudley Laufman passed away last week at the age of 95. He's best known for his extensive contribution to the 1970s contra dance revival, and especially for fostering live music. Twenty years ago [...

Our kids like listening to music on their tablets, and we decided it's worth it to pay some money so they can make playlists and don't need to listen to ads. A family account makes sense if you're more than one person, and we ended up with Amazon somewhat randomly. I've been poking around: the personalization features are pretty terrible, and they have a major artist confla...

I like to play multiple instruments at once, and really enjoy how this lets me create a fuller musical picture. Sometimes this looks like mandolin + foot drums + bass whistle:

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Or guitar + foot bass + singing:

I've been reading a lot of older writing, trying to understand how and why contra dance ended up with a strong and near-exclusive live music tradition when many other dance forms switched over to recorded music. One of the more interesting ones I came across is a series of three letters (1985, 1988, 1992) from Enid Cocke, President of the

I've lately ended up calling a bunch of parties and I've been happy with calling mostly longways whole-set dances. These are ones that are shaped like a contra ...