A lot of great dancers and performances of this generation were not nominated to the Best Lindy Hop of The 21st Century project. They might have been included with a broader range of nominators or just different ones altogether.

Many people who did submit nominations talked about how they really had to interrogate what they valued in the dance, and sometimes surprised themselves. Limiting yourself to your top five of anything creates a very high bar. Some people that I tried to convince to submit nominations just couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Others solved for that problem by just going with their sentimental picks.

With 25 years and thousands of options to choose from, it's hard for me to criticize anyone for their methodology. I do want to take advantage of this moment to talk about a number my own personal favorites that wouldn’t have made the list, but are important to me personally.

ALHC 2001 Classic Matt Smiley Naomi Uyama

We got the Classic and Showcase distinctions from West Coast Swing. Interestingly, they were not envisioned as divisions for choreographed routines; it was for couples to be able to dance to music they chose as opposed to other contest divisions where music and/or a partner are randomly assigned. In the beginning it was not uncommon for couples to just social dance their performance, especially in classic divisions without any choreography at all. Sylvia Sykes likes to describe the original intent of the Classic division as the best social dance you could ever imagine to your favorite song with your favorite partner. That’s how this performance feels to me, and it became the model for me to aspired to. It’s just fun and playful without being very flashy.

I took classes from both Naomi and Matt when I first started. Matt moved on from Lindy Hop a few years after this, but Naomi went on to a very successful career in the dance. A few years ago, I danced with Naomi at a random event, and I led something that I learned from Matt that I think is pretty rare see on the dancefloor. Without missing a beat, Naomi mentioned that she had heard from Matt recently. That moment reminded me of how Skye Humphries once referred to Lindy Hop as a sort of “useable history.” He actually meant that in a much broader sense, but I do appreciate how it can function that way on much more personal level.

ULHS 2005 - finale medium part 1

For the longest time, this was my go to video to show to people what social Lindy hop could look like because the dancing is fairly representative of what we do on a nightly basis. This was the only video I ever showed my mother to give her an idea of what I did in my free time. Mostly, it was just a good way to talk about people I knew in the clip to assure her that I actually had friends.

Couples Lindy Hop Contest @ Big Big Event 07

During the first swingout of the final all skate of this contest, I remember Stephanie Nolan grabbing my arm and screaming in my ear: “THIS NEVER GETS OLD!!!” It's still true to this day. Also fun to look back at this clip and realize that I’ve been to the weddings of five of the people in this contest.

Frankie95 Saturday Night Shim Sham

I wrote about this moment relation to it being my “greatest” moment at the time with the idea that your greatest moment isn't necessarily a positive thing. It's just the one of most significance. From the recap I wrote for Saturday night of Frankie95 in 2009:

”Watching that dance floor that night was like a religious experience. When Chazz said that it was time for the Shim Sham, the balconies emptied. Everyone was on that floor. When everyone was just dancing, you couldn’t help but notice the pulse. You know that pulse that Frankie always talked about. Just a gentle bob and sway of almost 2000 people swingin’ out. Sometimes you would see whole sections of the floor ripple with syncopations to certain breaks and hits in the music. It was like watching a very musical hive of bees. At that moment, it didn’t matter how long you had been dancing or how good you were. You were just a part of something indescribably special.”

Todd Yannacone & Nina Gilkenson perform at MWLF 2010

Another fun social dance, but mostly a reminder for me that people and relationships change over time. Sometimes not for the better. It is possible to move on and learn from that, but you can still miss the way things used to be.

Lindy Focus IX - Showcase - Jeff Camozzi & Liz Camozzi

The time from when we discovered that my mother’s cancer was terminal to when we returned from burying her in the Philippines was only a little over two months. It was a lot to deal with, and I remember my father telling me that it was ok to cry because apparently I didn’t through that entire time. I think I was just focused on getting things done. There was a lot to do at the time. When I finally came back to my apartment, I tried to unwind to catch up on some lindy hop videos that I had missed while I was gone and somehow ended up on this one even though it was from a few years prior. It is such a lovely sentiment, especially at the end, and it just broke me. I don’t remember when I stopped crying that night.

DCLX 2011 - Battle of the Bands - Honeysuckle Rose

I would say this night was a key point when the lindy hop scene turned from its fascination with New Orleans inspired music to classic big band music. In fact, the one of the organizers of Lindy Focus, Michael Gamble, points to this event as the inspiration for the week long big band line ups that would dominate Lindy Focus for the coming decade as well as its accompanying annual transcription project.

In this video, we have two of the most popular band leaders in the country at the time each leading their own full big bands in the historic Spanish Ballroom in Glen Echo Park. The energy was unreal. When you thought it couldn’t get any better, bassist Jason Jurzak yelled out “DIXIELAND BAND!?!” And to this day, I’m not sure if it was a question or a declaration of war.

ILHC 2011 - Classic Lindy - Peter Strom & Naomi Uyama

Before she left DC, I gave Naomi a lot of my music, which included a great album called Sassy Swings The Tivoli, a live album by Sarah Vaughan. This performance to “If I Could Write a Book” is a beautiful companion piece to my first selection, which was 10 years prior to this.

As someone who used to organize dance events, one of my pet peeves is musicians fiddling around the bandstand while performances are happening, but seeing Ernest McCarty settle in behind Naomi and Peter is so charming because of the personal history between them. I was sad to learn of his passing as I was writing up this post this weekend.

Ernest was a longtime bassist for The Boilermaker Jazz Band, and part of the the best rhythm sections of the modern era, in my opinion. Before the Boilermakers, he had a long musical career that included playing with Oscar Brown Jr., Erroll Gardner, and Gloria Gaynor. He was also an accomplished painter and playwright. While he was playing bass across the lindy hop scene, he was also artistic director for New Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh. The influence of the the band, and Ernest in particular, upon the rest of the lindy hop scene is immeasurable. They would frequently play in DC though the 2000s and spent countless hours engaging with Naomi and other dancers about music and art and creativity, and then they would go and carry those lessons with them as they taught lindy hoppers throughout the world.

Frankie 100 - Hellzapoppin' Lindy Hop Contest Finals with the Gordon Webster band

I don’t have any thoughts about this contest, but it does remind me of what happened right before. My mother passed away a few days before this. She wanted to be buried at home in the Philippines, but with the Memorial Day holiday, it took some extra time to process the paperwork to make that happen. I decided to go up to Frankie100 just to be somewhere else for a night, and to see some friends.

When she saw me, Sylvia Sykes gave me a huge hug, and sat me down to give me her condolences in only the way Sylvia could. She proceeded to tell me an extended story about her family, but we were interrupted by an organizer because they needed their head judge, Sylvia, in order to start this contest. I remember them clearing the floor and getting ready to start, but Sylvia refused to abandon me until she was done with her story. I can’t repeat it mostly because she just told me a lot of stuff, but I still appreciate how she knew her priorities in such a stressful moment.

I’m incredibly thankful to all the people who have engaged in my quest to determine the Best Lindy Hop of the 21st Century. Interestingly enough, quite a few people I’ve talked to have told me that they just don’t watch very many lindy hop videos nor want to.

Still, some of these videos have been watched thousands, sometimes millions of times. It’s wild to think that the technology to record images with sound is only about as old as Lindy Hop. Historians used to lament how so much knowledge was lost to the inability to record it, but now there is so much that it dwarfs previous generations’ conceptions of needles in haystacks or forests through trees.

Despite the promise of democratization and connection, the internet has become a vast, and often times, impersonal space which keeps providing reasons for why it shouldn’t be the main vehicle for human interaction. Instead, it’s best used as a tool, like a catalogue of real experiences that will hopefully inspire more of them.

p.s. The public vote to determine the best overall Lindy Hop performance of the 21st century is still live, but will close in a few days on December 24, 2025.

Click here to vote for the OVERALL Best Lindy Hop performance of the 21st Century