Most people wouldn’t watch live shows in Las Vegas and think, “How do I bring a Vegas-style show to LA that's over the top for big band swing — with dancing and tight vocal harmonics?”
Well, that’s what musician Aaron Jacobs says inspired Summer Swing Nights – a three-day series featuring a live 13-piece big band and lots of swing dancing. They’ve been performing this show at the Zimmerman Automobile Driving Museum in El Segundo since 2018.
The series also features food vendors, a bar, and free entry to the Zimmerman Museum, where you can see vintage cars like “the Packard limo of your dreams,” Jacobs says.
LA Swing Dance Posse is scheduled to give a special performance, dancing to covers and original arrangements by Jacobs’ in-house band, The Swing Tones. The group consists of six instrumentalists and seven singers who specialize in tight, seven-part vocal harmonies.
“I frequently say if the Andrew Sisters married The Manhattan Transfer and birthed Postmodern Jukebox, that would be The Swing Tones,” Jacobs says. “We take a lot of modern tunes and ‘swingify’ it. So we have all the old greats that people love. But we also have quite a collection of original arrangements that we do to three-part, four-part, and seven-part vocal harmonics.”
The instrumentalists of The Swing Tones perform at Summer Swing Nights at El Camino College in June 2021. Photo by Jose Amaral, courtesy of Aaron Jacobs.
Though swing hasn’t been mainstream since the 1920s, Jacobs says that Summer Swing Nights is a “really encompassing” experience, where people won’t expect what comes next.
“It's the one thing to have the big band swing with tight vocal harmonics. It's another thing to have dancers take the floor, which is very electric. It's another thing to be inside a vintage car museum, in the helm of El Segundo, right down the street from Mattel,” he says.
Summer Swing Nights starts on Friday, August 4, at 8 p.m. Doors open at 7 p.m. You can buy your tickets at the door or online.
People dance the night away at the Zimmerman Automobile Driving Museum during Summer Swing Nights in the summer of 2019. Photo by Jose Amaral, courtesy of Aaron Jacobs.