Retro Weekend-and-a-bit

Saturday saw me and two band-mates boogieing on at "Hot Pants", the weekly 70s night at City Hall. It's a very large venue which would happily swallow up several hundred goers and still look vacuous. The music was safe if fairly uninspired, but some of the attendees made an effort - sporting wigs, shades, hats and such in the era's style that they had purchased from the concession stand. The obvious connection to my deciding to write about it here is the New York scene at that time when salsa was gaining popularity, and the Hustle of "Saturday Night Fever" fame which is a close relative to salsa. It wasn't difficult to assemble movement from salsa, merengue, hustle, and jive vocabulary on-the-fly to the song of the moment.

But apart from my deciding to go there and enjoy myself with a couple of friends, it provided a much-needed baseline experience to measure the salsa scene against. I think over the years I'd come to take the camaraderie of salsa for granted. True, there are some minor foibles that I think it could do without, but in general the excessive alcohol intake and associated issues more common in other scenes don't feature often in salsa. Also a greater proportion of people in salsa dance because they enjoy it than using it as a vehicle of courtship display.

And yesterday, I had a big dose of Motown in the form of the play "Dancing in the Streets". Now THAT was cool. It was very well rehearsed; the mark of a group that's been touring for a while, and a very brave effort by the cast who were trying to emulate the inimitable: Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder. No Jacksons though, I wonder why...

Again, that music was seminal to the development of the short-lived boogaloo. I love the way Motown's music is simple yet capable of expressing such exuberance. That's why I also love Fania's work.

That's enough gushing for now.

You may have already noticed that I've completed the "For Players" section of the website, at least for the time being. That leaves me in the throes of writing about Puerto Ricans in salsa, and as usual the project's grown in scope; it'll now be spread across two sections (which incidentally I think is fair, to balance the emphasis on Cuba). I've nearly finished the first draft of the first section which I've decided to call "Island Life". It'll take quite a bit of polishing, so don't expect it arrive any sooner than two weeks from now.

That's enough blogging for the moment. I've got a History to get back to.

Yeo Loo Yen