For the last couple years I’ve been quite keen on a subgenre of electronic music that gets it character by incorporating samples of old 30s-era swing music. The genre’s still too small to have an official name, but I’ll go ahead and dub it electro-swing. Just recently I discovered that several of the tracks in my electro-swing collection all sample the same 1939 Billie Holliday song “Swing Brother Swing.” It’s pretty cool to hear how different artists have chopped up and repurposed the same source material. Have a listen to the original recording in the youtube clip above, and then check out how it was sampled below.

Bonobo - Sugar Rhyme
This isn’t the first time I’ve posted this sexy downtempo classic. It’s the first Bonobo track to ever grace my ears and it’s still one of my favorites. Not much sampled from the original other than Billie’s voice.

Parov Stelar - Wanna Get
The undisputed king of electro-swing ignored the original vocal and instead grabbed bits of the saxophone and piano instrumentation as the basis of this chill house number.

Dirty Dubsters - Swing It Brother
And lastly we have a much more straight-forward breaks remix of the track form the Dirty Dubsters. They take the original track and layer on the requisite thick bass and breakbeats.

What do you think of electro-swing? I’ve been laying low on the DJing for a while now, but you’ll be hearing more of this stuff from me, as I attempt to carve out a new sound for myself. I’ll get a podcast of electro-swing out soon.