Month: July 2008

7/19/08

Anjali and I are back in NYC.  She has been here a couple times since I have.  My last trip was August of last year.  I would hate to visit any less often than once a year.  All it takes is flipping open the Time Out once I get here, and I remember just how much amazing cultural activity is happening here all the time, but especially in Summer, when every day brings a host of different free concerts at many parks throughout the city.  We started off our trip by blowing off a GlobeSonic night, and Turntables on the Hudson with Maga Bo as a special guest, in order to hang out with our fabulous host JD.  

I’m obsessed with finding out everything going on in town once I arrive, only to blow off just about everything when it actually comes time to do it.  At night the thought of catching a bus, transferring several subways, staying out all night, and then repeating in reverse order rarely sounds appealing when I have already had a full day exploring the city.  By the end of an NYC trip I usually have  a list of amazing experiences, not ones I have had, but ones I have blown off due to a lack of energy and motivation.  Since there are usually multiple enticing things going on in any given evening, and I won’t be able to do all of them, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to do none of them.  Anjali and I slept for a portion of the early evening, thinking we were going to go out later, only to realize that a lot of the outdoor concerts we were thinking about going to ended early.  Oh, we’ve already missed five activities?  Let’s cancel the sixth and seventh as well.  Of course when the alternative is spending a quiet evening in with friends, just what am I missing out on really?

Anjali and I are far from careerist when we plan our trips.  We usually decide on our itinerary far too late to get any gigs, as club schedules fill up months in advance, and we are rarely booking our trips months in advance.  The amazing Joro Boro was kind enough to invite us to join him in DJing the Boban Markovic Orkestar after-party at Drom on Wednesday, so we ended up with a gig after all.  The funny thing is that rather than being excited, my initial response was one of dread.  I usually bring far too much music to my gigs, which isn’t possible when I’m traveling, and I have carry-on restrictions and checked baggage item and weight limits.  Every time I fly to a gig I am up until 4:30am-6:30am the night before desperately trying to pare down the music I am bringing, even after having already devoted several days to working on the process.  This time I was only up until 3:30am, so I am improving slightly.  Being a laptop DJ would make this a non-issue, but I am still resistant to going the computer DJ route.  

While I am spending days of stress and anxiety trying to minimize the music I am packing for a gig, I am also aware of my curse, which will probably make it all a waste of time anyway.  My curse is that the more time I put into stressing about a gig and preparing, the more likely it is that I will hardly play, if at all.  As an example, Anjali and I were flown out to Nebraska to DJ a half-Indian/half-American wedding a few months ago, and I had to bring a mix of Indian and American music, which meant my job was extra-tough, as I had an enormous amount of music to choose from that needed to be reduced to what I could take on the flight.  I spent days on the process, and didn’t get any sleep the night before the flight.  When we arrived at the wedding we learned that a third DJ was going to be joining us, and I ended up only DJing a half-hour at the end of the night.  Recently we were hired to play the Extra Golden show at Atlas, before, between and after bands.  E3 played, Anjali played, and things got so off-schedule, there was no time for a closing set, so I never played, even after I had spent days preparing a special set of African music.  This sort of thing is not unusual at all, so even as I spend all night trying to select a set for a gig abroad, part of me knows that all the work is entirely unnecessary.  I can never just let go, however, because it would be unthinkable for me to not put some real effort into preparing to play the best set I can.  We shall see what happens after the Boban Markovic concert. 

IK

After three years of waiting, Booty Call is finally back!  A night of nasty words and nasty music.  Only for those who like it dirty.

IK

7/04/08

It has been quite a long time since I failed as spectacularly as I did at the Fez Ballroom at the June Andaz. It was a hot, hot, hot day for Portland: 100 degrees Farenheit. The heat was even more startling, given that the nights have been around 50 degrees lately. The number of people at our club nights is usually inversely proportional to how hot it is that day. When I checked the forecast last week, and saw how hot Saturday was going to be, I knew we would be having a really lightly-attended night. Really light. A little less than 250 people through the door makes it our quitest Andaz night in many years, although given how hot it was, we were lucky that anyone was there at all. We were also fortunate to have Joti Singh, founder of the Duniya Dance Company, up from San Francisco, to grace our night out with a bhangra dance lesson.

Before she began the lesson I had started the night out playing a bunch of Telugu soundtracks. My love affair with Tollywood music has continued unabated since I finally got serious about my interest after four years, and started buying just about every Tollywood soundtrack I could get my hands on in the last six months. It has been one of the most inspiring sources of new sounds for me in 2008, and one of my big challenges these days is to figure out how to incorporate more of this music into my sets.

It wasn’t my first set that was a spectacular failure, nor my second set, which I think was generally well-received. In fact, at points during my second set there was such a dense group of people literally jumping up and down near the DJ booth, that I had to grab on to the rocking DJ table to stabilize it in a succesful attempt to keep the music from skipping. I forced “Pappu Can’t Dance” (Remix) into my set, because even if no one knows it yet, I have been obsessed with both versions of the song lately. Major cheeze pop infatuation going on there. I hardly played any bhangra. The few Panjabi songs I did play I felt like I had to forcibly crowbar into my set, and while Anjali appreciated them, I’m not sure who else did. Except for my friends Deep and Cheema, I didn’t get any Panjabi requests all night.

No matter how hot it was, and no matter how much the Fez felt like the inside of an aquarium, Anjali kept the floor filled with dancers until 2am when we switched off for the final time. In the days before Andaz, I found myself reflecting on gigs in the past when Anjali had established such a tight rapport with the crowd that I felt helpless to do anything other than clear the floor once I went on after her. In my reflecting I felt like that was a distant past, that didn’t appply to where I am at as a DJ today. It was like remembering an ancient version of myself, that I have since overcome.

Funny.

Anjali’s last song was “Khai Ke Paan Banaras Wala,” so I knew I was going to need to start off with an older classic that everyone knew. Lately I’ve been listening to the 6-CD Bhangra Grove compilation, which has a CD of filmi bhangra, and rediscovering lots of old songs I had forgotten about. I had resurrected “Kudiyaan Shehar Diyan” from Arjun Pandit for Filmistan recently, and that went over so well, that I decided to take the same tack at Andaz. As a general rule, Anjali and I never play Daler Mehndi at Andaz, no matter how many requests we might get. When Rang de Basanti was huge, I did play the title song several times, simply in response to the tide of requests, but that is the exception to the rule. However, based on the ecstatic response that  “Kudiyaan Shehar Diyan” received at Filmistan, I decided to see if lightning would strike twice. However, I didn’t cue up “Kudiyaan Shehar Diyan,” but another Daler Mehndi song directly preceding it on the CD, “Na Na Na Na Na Re.” Maybe if I had successfully cued up the song I intended to things would have gone different. Who can say?

“Na Na Na Na Na Re” is a hyper-fast spazz fest, and Anjali had already warned me during my earlier set that people were so hot and tired that I better lower the BPMs, since people weren’t going to be able to keep up. In the opening seconds of the song I didn’t even have to look up to feel the energy sucked out of the entire room. I knew that I just made up everyone’s minds that now was the moment to leave for home. Apparently in addition to being an awful song choice, Anjali came in the booth to let me know that the recording sounded horrible. She thought it sounded so distorted that it was as if I was playing a noise rock song or something. As I watched 100 some dancers heading for the exit while my first song played I realized I had to salvage the situation immediately in a major way if I was to be playing to anyone other than myself for my final set. I decided to play another Amitabh classic, “Rang Barse,”hoping against hope, that I could dissuade some of the fleeing patrons from their current course of action. Never mind that it is a Holi song. Never mind that we are months past that celebration. I was just trying to lure some people back with a classic. No dice, although Anjali did say that people were singing along on their way out the door, so I guess that is my consolation prize.

Having cleared nearly everyone in the club except for Cheema and Deep, I played their respective requests, Diljit’s “Sharaab” and Surinder Shinda’s “Put Jattan De,” and then without much thought, put on the Safri Boys “Pao Bhangra,” before leaving to move the car, which was parked far from the club. This was at 2:25am, and I figured that the four dancers left in the club wouldn’t have a problem with my shutting things down a half hour early. I had sympathy for the Fez staff, and didn’t want to keep them late, if most of the dancers had gone home. Anjali and I had not had any food since lunch, so she was eating her dinner at 2:30am at a table outside the DJ booth when I left her to go move the car. I find out from her later that the four remaining dancers flipped her shit for shutting down at 2:30am instead of 3:00am, and she didn’t appreciate my abandoning her to deal with unhappy dancers when I had simply left and not even announced, “last song” or anything. Oops. I couldn’t imagine the few people left would have any problem with a 2:30am closing time, after such a long, hot night. I was wrong. They weren’t quitters, unlike me, so I will give them that. Just don’t abuse Anjali having her first meal in twelve hours, when its my fault the music stopped.

See you next month.

IK