This can present a problem when going out to clubs. Being the extremely frugal person that I am (some of my friends have less kind words to describe this trait) I abhore the idea of paying for something I don't have to. Four pesos (the equivalent of a little over a dollar american) for a coat check? No way, I could get a cup of coffee or half a pizza with that money! So when I went out on Friday night, dressed in layers, I checked my jacket, but I wore my sweatshirt over my shoulders through a long night of dancing.
Most of the foreign kids who come to stay in Buenos Aires go to boliches (nightclubs) that play music that they're familiar with--American hip hop and rock/pop tunes. While I like to be haughty and say that I'm more adventurous musically than my peers I still like to dance to music I'm familiar with. And in the states I get down to the skittering offbeats of ska, which is what I was after on Friday night when I went to see Dancing Mood and Aztecas Turpos.
But first a few words about ska. Most Americans who know what ska music is do not associate it with reggae, rocksteady and other jamaican musical styles, but with the sort of a American ska punk hybrid that became popular in the 1990's.
This song is one that received a lot of radio airplay back then and is the sort of thing that most Americans probably associate with ska.
There's also a scene for ska bands that play in style closer to that of the original jamaican bands like the Skatalites, Desmond Dekker and Prince Buster, many of whom eventually started playing reggae.
In
I went with a group of kids from my program including my good friend Sam, who is a huge Bob Marley fan, and loves reggae from all over the world. When we walked in, Sam and I gave each other a knowing glance as the smell of weed smoke that's unavoidable at reggae shows washed over us. But as soon as the first band came up playing reggae fronted by a dreadlocked Argentine (I still can't get over that) we went nuts, and it was all uphill from there. The second band, Aztecas Tupro (I never found out the name of the first band) played a heavier, more rock oriented reggae sound, mixing it with some of the local rhythms Argentines are used to (like cumbia--more on that later I think).
This all went down in Teatro Colegiales an old theatre converted by The Roxy, an interantional bar/club organization, which in Buenos Aires brings in international acts as well as local ones like Friday night. The house DJs that played between sets impressed me with their ability to keep people dancing after the band stopped playing. Usually the sound manager throws on some music in between sets that has nothing to do with the music that the band was just playing. Yet this DJ managed to play music in a similar vein--and all music from Latin America that I had never heard before!--and keep people dancing until another form of entertainment interrupted our revelery.
This interruption came in the form of clowns. Certainly not something I'd ever seen happen in a nightclub or a rock club for that matter. I went to the bathroom in the middle of dancing, intending to come back right away and I was surprised to find that people were all crowded around the floor. As I came closer I saw men in brightly colored suits, outrageous hats and shoes juggling. I enjoyed the break from dancing as I was pretty tired by this point and I was really impressed; they were really good. It was also performed to music which added to it quite a bit. It reminded me of a similar change that my friend Jim Kogler enacted in the Case Juggling Club (he's the only one not wearing a T-shirt in this picture). He's also a swing dancer and so the idea of juggling to music appealed to him and he was able to quite successfully perform juggling routines in ways that fit the music that he had picked, something swing dancers would call "musicality". So the show was both entertaining and reminded me of home at the same time.
The headliner of the show was a horns-led big band called Dancing Mood. Dancing Mood plays in a style that's reminiscint of The Skatalites in their fusion of ska rhythms with the jazz convention of playing a theme, letting all of the instruments solo and then going back to the theme. It doesn't necessarily sound like a scheme that would inspire wild dancing from a crowd of people--in fact I'm not sure that it would in the United States--but this is Buenos Aires. As soon as the first song, The Skatalites' Police Woman, started up everyone was jumping, skanking, singing (even though it´s completely instrumental) and coliding into one another like there was no tomorrow. I eventually got too tired to endure more jumping and collisions, so I staggered up to the front where I could see the band better. And this was when I came to appreciate one of the great advantages of this kind of music, you can simultaneously enjoy it as music to chill out to, enjoy the soloing, or dance to it and go nuts. It's an odd combination, to have in the same room people smoking blunts and staring lazily ahead at the band, and people moshing as if it were punk band.
A friend of mine back in the States, upon my telling him that I'd gotten into ska music, told me that he didn't like the vocals, referring I suppose to the off-key singing bordering on yelling common to many ska punk bands.
I went to a dancing mood show before with an Argentine friend of mine, and I told her this combination of the ska and punk scenes in the U.S. and how the musical hybrid had developed and she was surprised ¨but ska is like, relaxing music. It´s got nothing to do with punk¨
In a way they’re both right.
This is one of the things that I like about ska, that it´s been able to be adapted to punk, as well as jazz (like Dancing Mood or the New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble) and even electronica in the form of dub.
This kind of diversity can surprise people when they´re used to one thing and they get another. I think it´s a bit like taking someone who’s never heard of rock music and showing them a video of Chuck Berry next to another one of Iron Maiden. They wouldn’t believe you if you said that this was the same type of music.
The common denominator is that ska was and is dancing music (unlike rock which dropped dancing decades ago). Whether it’s the slower groovier beat of Roots ska or the frenetic pace of ska-punk, it’s all dancing music when done right. It means that you can find music that sounds different and offers you something new, but you still understand it because it has that familiar offbeat rhythm. Which is why when I went to the show in Niceto, I danced the night away to music that I still felt like I knew, even though it was very different from the ska bands that play in
Dancing Mood playing their version of Dave Brubeck´s Take Five.
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