Open Letter to Brave Combo

Dear Brave Combo,

I had the inimitable pleasure of dancing to your music when you were out here at Stanford a couple of years ago. I've also gotten considerable enjoyment (and dancing!) out of all of your recordings. In short: I'm a fan. With that as my meager excuse, I would like to be presumptuous for a moment and ask a favor of you.

There is a dance that is very popular out here in the Bay Area dance community, called The Congress of Vienna. A fine little choreography to a lovely piece of music. However, by "popular" I mean that at certain dance events playing it twice per evening is a mandate. This has been going on for at least seven years, since that was about when I first learned the choreography. At this point, the poor dance desperately needs revitalizing. Various people around here, myself included, have considered re-choreographing it, but I think what it really needs is new music to shake things up a bit.

This is where you (I hope) come in. I've fantasized for a long time about what a Brave Combo version of The Congress of Vienna would be like. Your Box of Ghosts album especially inspires this, since I love how you take Mozart and Chopin and others, turn them on their heads, and make fun dance music out of them. That's what we need here, and if you were to record this, I would be eternally grateful. I've transcribed the basic melody and chords for you, and from there I'll just say: go nuts with it. Find something new in it that I can't find on my own after seven years of dancing to it. And imagine yourselves giving a shot of new energy to an entire dance community.

What's in this for you? Well, I hoping you'll just plain old enjoy the tune and have fun playing with it, but I should really make a better offer than that. So I'll say that if you record this tune, I will personally buy ten of your CDs and distribute them to people who have never heard your music before. And you will, of course, get full credit wherever I can get the recording played for dances.

So what do you think?

Sincerely,
Graham

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I've said it before and I'll say it again: It would be the height of awesomeness to have an alternate recording of The Congress of Vienna by Brave Combo. So I'm finally getting around to writing this up and sending it to them. Anyone want to second me on this? And/or help create an alternate choreography? Leave a comment!