LAMC Day 2: Dance your face off!
Fueled by the energy of Venezuelan dance-rock group La Vida Boheme‘s performance the night before, I awoke in Queens with a skip in my step and made the casi 2-hour trek into the heart of Manhattan.
For a city on the move, there’s actually a lot of disconnected (i.e. non-interweb) downtime in this city. Ironically, the downtime itself is on the move via bus, train and sidewalk. It’s refreshing to see people reading (actual books and the good ole fashioned newspaper, not just iphones and kindles) on the subway. Luckily I brought along Three Cups of Tea for my traveling pleasure.
I arrived at The Roosevelt Hotel in time for a great panel on the clash between terrestrial, satellite and internet radio. Fue realment interesante. Panelists talked about the Latino population as the fastest growing music audience and the spectrum of Latin music listeners widening every day as the music itself diversifies. After all, what is “Latin music”? Music in Spanish? Music with Afro and Latin rhythms? Music sung by Latinos? In such a connected world, it’s silly to pin down a genre according to mere language or the color of the skin of the person singing it.
I think panelists generally agreed that it’s whatever music we Latinos allow to come out of us, whether it be R&B, jazz, hip hop, rock, folk, electronica, in English, in Spanish, in Portuguese. Whatever the flavor, it’s music, and if it’s good, it deserves play on any station, terrestrial or in the sky, alongside artists of an equivalent genre. Latin music ain’t just tejano and salsa anymore, people! The bummer thing is that it’s hard, if not impossible, to get non-traditional Latin music placed in mainstream radio. The good news is, there are some incredible publicly-owned tastemaker radio stations that scour the interweb for Latin artists to play alongside their popular English-language indie, hip hop, electronica and rock artists. The main ones are LA’s KCRW, Seattle’s KEXP, and National Public Radio! Love me some public radio.
The rest of the day was an increasingly hysterical episode of nonstop witty (and not-so-witty) banter, ridiculous accents, and relentless jokes when I found myself with Austin songstress Scarlett Olson and Brooklyn hip-hop/pop artists Mauricio Alexander. We caught Guatelmala’s Gaby Moreno (who found her passion in the sounds of America’s 20th century blues and jazz music) belting over a roomful of chatty Latinos with Aretha-like vocal power. Man, that girl can sing!
The hysterical trio continued on to Que Bajo!, a fringe show by DJs Geko Jones, Uproot Andy, Chan-Cha Via Circuito, Austin’s DJ Orion y mas, and danced our faces off! I’d had the pleasure of meeting Jasmine Garsd of Alt. Latino earlier in the day and joined her at DROM in Manhattan for some intense dancing until 3 a.m. Paula and her friend Kingsley joined Scarlett and Mauricio and I for the booty shaking and salsa dancing and I can safely say I haven’t danced that much in years!
From there, Paula took me to get some hot and I mean HOT tea for my ailing throat (too much talking) after which we went to Brooklyn to push Kingsley’s car, which wasn’t starting, to the other side of the street (New Yorkers can’t leave their car on one side of the street for more than 24 hours – weird). He managed to get about 12 people into the street to help him at 2:30 a.m. These people really don’t sleep!
My one regret of the evening was not recording our goofy trio’s antics. We had some crazy alcohol-inspired ideas, not the least of which was our creation of a new genre, mixing folk and reggaeton/hip hop. It shall be called “ReggaeFolkeTonKlorico,” hahahaha… Shall our insanity ever see the light of day again? Hmm… perhaps there’s a way to resurrect the magic of the evening… special YouTube series!
Tags: Alt Latino, Austin, Chan Cha Via Circuito, Geko Jones, gina chavez, indie music, Jasmine Garsd, La Vida Boheme, LAMC, Latin alternative, Latin music, Mauricio Alexander, Scarlett Olson
Im just now reading this. You are the best Gina Chavez! I had so much fun with you at LAMC. Thanks for the mention and the photos! Lots of love from Nueva York, and can’t wait to work on our new album! lol