Too much Latin Jazz rather than too much Mambo

November 17, 2006

Playlist

La Llave - Grupo Latin Vibe (1)
Sientate Ahi - Oscar D'Leon
Mandali - Africando (2)
Malanga Amarilla - Cachao (3)
Descarga Cubana - Cal Tjader
Asia Mood - Tito Puente
El Menu - El Gran Combo
Adelante Siempre Voy - Ray Barretto
Llore - Hector Lavoe
Acabo De Llegar - Alex Leon
Cuando Te Vea - Tito Puente (4)*
Descarga Del Barrio - Ray Barretto (-4%)*
Te Quiero - Oliver
Senora - Dominic Marte (5)
Hong Kong Mambo - Tito Puente
Mambo Diablo - Tito Puente (70's Fania recording) (6)*
Caravan - Pucho and His Latin Soul Brothers (90's recording) (7)
Descarga Lebron - Lebron Brothers (-3%) (8)

break

La Quiero - Dominic Marte (9)
No Me Resigno - Toque D' Keda
Micaela - Sonora Carruseles (10)
El Pito - Isidro Infante (11)
I Love Salsa - N'Klabe (-5%) (12)
You Rock My World - Michael Jackson (Berna Jam Remix) (13)
Cachondea - Fruko Y Sus Tesos (-4%) (14)
Merengue track #5 from Vishal's CD (15)
Merengue track #7 from Vishal's CD (16)
Brujeria - Mark Dimond (canta: Angel Canales) (17)*
Mi Desengano - Roberto Roena (18)
Hacha Y Machete - Hector Lavoe (19)

(1) I felt that this was a perfectly reasonable choice as the first song of the evening. Neutral in tone, easy on the ears and slow-medium in speed with clear beats. It is no surprise why this song was used frequently as a practice song by Mario and Susana at the LDA. For the past two weeks, Sally has been using this song as one of the practice songs.
(2) Vishal's comment was that this was "perfect." My understanding is that this song has been a mainstay for at least 5 years. It could be considered tired and boring or tried and true. For tonight, it seemed to me that the number of people dancing decreased steadily from the first to the second to the third song.
(3) The trend of decreasing number of people seemed to reverse starting with this song. The dance floor looked excellent hereto forth for the Salsa songs until my first break. The crowd was a little older, but I noticed some pretty good dancers among some of these older folks.
(4) The previous song had change of tempo in the middle of the song. This one had couple of transitions.
(5) The number of people dancing to Bachata was smaller for both songs compared to all previous songs (including during the lowest point during Mandali). I think Cyrille, Euvan and Zhenzhi arrived shortly before the first Bachata song.
(6) I think the first request for Merengue came around at this time. There was a second request shortly thereafter with a claim that everyone wanted it, but to my eyes well over half to three fourth of the people were dancing.
(7) I went to look for Vishal so that he could play some Merengue. Meanwhile I decided to stay with hardcore Salsa dance numbers. As I see it, people who like Merengue don't dance Salsa most of the time anyway. So why should they complain about what's being played for people who are actually dancing? Still even Luis seemed taken aback and disappointed. It's not hard to imagine what could have happened - You go to a place and hear the DJ playing music you like. You talk your friends into going to the same place by saying great things about the music. When you arrive with your friends, you are surprised to find that not every song being played are the ones you remember as being great. You feel as if you need to apologize for every song that might not be universally liked by your friends. Unfortunately, that is how it will be unless the DJ choooses to play same great songs every time ... until they get so overplayed that they are not great anymore.
(8) Apparently the complaint (from as many as 6 people according to Vishal) was that too much Mambo or even Latin Jazz was being played tonight. Darn. And I have been holding back from playing more Latin Jazz all this time. Vishal started his session with four (!) Merengue numbers in a row. Briefly it sounded as if the fifth one was going to be Merengue as well. I suppose all this was done to try to erase "bad taste" left by Latin Jazz. Oh well. As it was, the third and the fourth Merengue were overkill, and even the first two were not big draws for the dance floor. For the rest of the evening, Salsa was the best dance crowd pleaser while Bachata and Merengue were consistently less popular.
(9) After a long Merengue-thon, Vishal played bunch of Salsa (starting with Playa No More) with a lot of fusing of songs.
(10) I told Vishal that I was planning on going easy on Latin Jazz/Mambo for the rest of the evening. In fact this was the idea regardless of what he said. Perhaps I did play even more conventional "safe" songs more than I did because of all the purported complaints. In any case, next series of songs were "duds" as far as the dance floor was concerned. Micaela was okay but even its reception seemed muted. Perhaps it would have been better if many Salsa songs Vishal played during his stint did not make this sound like more of the same. Cyrille seemed to make fun of this song on the dance floor. Of course, he did miss the first hour when I was playing different sounding songs.
(11) Another bomb. Even I am surprised by this one - I didn't expect this to bomb ever.
(12) Maybe -4% would have been better. Another bomb. Luis calls for Merengue.
(13) Another bomb with what Vishal might call "commercial Salsa". This is getting ridiculous.
(14) Another bomb. I sampled through Vishal's Merengue CD to pick less obvious songs just so that I wouldn't have to answer to more Merengue complaints.
(15) Luis motions that he didn't think Merengue was a good idea. Whatever. I think everyone was taken by surprise too. Bomb.
(16) I wanted track #6 not #7. Track #7 was a variation of Suavemente. Bomb. Vishal had used tracks #1, #3, #4 and #5 earlier in the evening. Blah blah. #1 is Suavemente. Blah blah.
(17) Now that I seemingly succeeded in alienating everyone (at least no one seems happy - neither the Salsa dancers nor the Merengue dancers judging by the dance floor), I decided to go with a risky choice. Nothing to lose. Interesting song. Not a crowd drawer though.
(18) Good song. Still no crowd. Oh well. I didn't see anyone doing anything interesting with the song - not even by Cyrille.
(19) Finally this final song brings people onto the dance floor. Vishal followed this with Ran Kan Kan by Tito Puente from Mambo Birdland recording (seemingly breaking his rule about Mambo for the rest of the evening), and the dance floor was full again for these two songs. It would not stay that way though. My assessment is that the dance floor was crowded during La Llave (first song) and again from the tail end of Malanga Amarilla to Descarga Del Barrio, again starting from Hong Kong Mambo to first or second Merengue, again during Vishal's turn at playing Salsa his first time around (this might have been when the floor was at its most crowded - but my point of view at this point was from the dance floor as opposed to from the DJ booth so I could be wrong), and finally between Hacha Y Machete and Ran Kan Kan. An interesting aside: Vishal played couple of Cha Cha later in the evening (I am not sure why it happened, but it must have been worth enough to play two in a row - I wasn't really paying attention to the dance floor at that time).

Total - 30 songs. 24 Salsa. 4 Bachata. 2 Merengue. 4 new Salsa songs. Despite there being only 4 new songs, it might have seemed like the place sounded very different compared to many other Fridays at least until the first Merengue came on.

Jay and Jane substituted for Johnny and Serap again. I had thought that they were gone for one week, not two. The lessons started a little late according to Abit because of rain causing people to arrive late. Thus even though I was a little late in arriving too, I was in time to start the social part of the evening at the DJ booth with some minutes to spare.

Even before Cyrille, Zhenzhi, Euvian and Stephanie showed up, I was thinking that this was an interesting Friday evening as far as the kind of people who showed up for Salsa dancing. Of special note was an elder couple, who I thought were quite good. Even though they did not stay very long, they and others who I considered as people who are very interested in learning to dance well inspired me to stay away from fluff songs early on. This is not to say that I deliberately played bad songs at any time (although it would be easy to argue that some of the later choices were uninspired and perhaps deliberately so).

Having Cyrille, Zhenzhi, Euvian and Stephanie certainly changed tone of the evening for me in terms of dancing and socializing. As things stood before their arrival, it looked like I was going to be dancing more than usual by Friday standards because a fair number of prospective dance partners, including those whom I haven't seen in a while (e.g. Anastasia, Alison and Clare), were present. In the end, I missed out on dancing with some people I normally would have asked for a dance. I also danced with only one new person (a friend of Anastasia's? - the pair of dances was good fun) whole night.

Other notable dancing moments included a dance with Stephanie consisting mostly of shines (during Ran Kan Kan in part because it's a long and fast song and in another part because she had just danced with Cyrille and presumably thus was recovering from a good workout) and amusing heck out of Zhenzhi couple of times again using the extremely arm-twisty move I got from Joe a little over a month ago. Unlike many others who have seen and suffered through the times when I started using it, Zhenzhi is getting to see only a more smoothly led version of the move because of her long break away from Salsa dancing.

Aside from feeling tired (more due to not having enough sleep more than too much exercise) and from a feeling of stagnation in terms of turn patterns, it was a fun night. The evening ended with a late night trip to shop for groceries (I was running dangerously low) after 2 AM and with a plan to sleep as much as possible. Hopefully I will feel rested enough by Sunday.