Keeping pulse of Club Salsa Wednesday

June 28, 2006

Combining factors like couple of people asking me whether I was going to be at Club Salsa on Wednesday and the Kings Cross train station fiasco yesterday, I decided to see how things are and maybe dance a little. It turned out that some of the people I thought I might see did not show up. Oh well. I ended up having 7 dances with 6 women after sitting out for the first half dozen songs. Most of the dances were fairly low-key; I wasn’t very good one time I tried to make more of an effort to do more. One way of seeing this is that my slump is still ongoing. Another way to see it is that I did not get much chance to stretch, expand and test my abilities (whatever ability I have that is).

As DJ, Cristian started with 8-10 Salsa followed by one each of Merengue and Bachata. The pattern thereafter was 6-8 Salsa followed by two non-Salsa (Merengue and Bachata usually but based upon past experience two Merengue in a row sometimes). Salsa selections included Lovely Day, El Pito - Isidro Infante (perhaps beginning to get overplayed), Me Voy Pa’ Cali – Oscar D’Leon (I have it but I haven't played it because it gets played plenty of times by others) and was generally not NY friendly in my opinion. I would say about half the songs were unfamiliar, which I like and approve in principle. With one song, however, I could not figure out where beat 1 once I lost it – it was not a case of not being able to differentiate between 1 and 5 – I was able to figure out the core beats and thus the speed of the song but couldn’t differentiate between 1, 3, 5, and 7. Merengue and Bachata selections are more varied and unfamiliar – good things in my opinion once again.

Theodore showed up just before I left, and I was able to give him my compliments for his Merengue selections from last Friday. I did tell him that 3 Merengue in a row was a little too much, and he replied that he almost played 4 Merengue in a row. Whew!

Miscellaneous. I had a clarification about the AC. The old AC unit between the DJ booth and the bar had been nonfunctional for some time, so Vishal moved the AC unit that used be face the stairs. Thus there is no new AC, but simply a new arrangement to help cool the main dance floor rather than the seating area. There is a new lighting arrangement, which I thought was pretty nice. For now the new lights affect only the seating area, but Vishal said there will be more changes with the lights.