Re: people get ready (moRe: [acid-jazz] 21st century urban music observation.)

From: steph99 (beleza@speakeasy.net)
Date: Thu Aug 22 2002 - 18:01:50 CEST

  • Next message: Juuso Koponen: "Re: [acid-jazz] 21st century urban music observation."

    > see the thing is this, some of us want to invite
    > everyone to the party and we get bummed out when 90%
    > of them don't want to go. we still go on (we're

    yeah, this is true, I can't count how many disappointing turnouts I've seen and
    had, but we're also very lucky. The kind of music a lot of us are playing now
    is really accessible in a way, and if you catch people at the right angle and
    trick them, like making them think you're playing salsa (people love that!!) or
    a type of house (which might not be *too* far from the truth), they eat it up.
    My experience djing in the last couple years is that the response is either very
    flat or really exuberant. I find that drawing that line or making that bridge
    between what people know they like and what *you* know they should like based on
    what they're already listening to, is the golden formula. It's pretty reliable.
    I did see it fail once, when a friend of mine was playing wonderfaul brazilian
    carnival style house-related stuff to a latin/afro house crowd and they kinda
    liked it but had no idea how to dance to it, but I've had a lot of luck with it.

    It's not just house/salsa-to-broken beat, there is a strong connection between
    classic soul and, say, Kaidi Tatham and Afronaught. Ok, that's stating the
    obvious to music-lovers, but regular people hear it too. I've had lots of
    older-than-20-something couples come up and be really excited about a brand new
    tune because it was so evocative of 70s soul. This weekend in the park, there
    was a guy who must have been in his late 40s or 50s *at least* who was nodding
    his head to a lot of jazz, but got up and boogied to jungle! He was so excited
    about it. The connections are there, the challenge is making them smoothly
    enough to trick people, and hoping against hope that you happen to get a
    critical mass of people in the crowd with open minds and infectious spirits.

    I shudder to think that maybe it would be a good idea to advertise as house, b/c
    I really have a limited tolerence for the monotonous beats (sorry, househeads)
    but this phenomenon is something to consider. Agh, marketing/promoting is the
    most miserable job for so many of us music types.



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