[Dixielandjazz] Will young folks close dance again ?

[Stephen G Barbone]

Below article excerpted from the NY Times. Will close dancing become all the rage again? Should Forro be presented at music festivals? Maybe so. How about "Jazz for Dancing"?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


July 12, 2012 - NY Times - By Larry Rohter
A Two-Step Invasion of Brazilian Energy

By LARRY ROHTER

IN its birthplace in northeast Brazil the folksy, accordion-driven and highly danceable music style known as forró used to be derided as “music for maids and taxi drivers.” No more: not only has the style become popular with a certain hip crowd in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in recent years, but this also seems to be the summer of forró in New York.

On Friday the Midsummer Night Swing series at Lincoln Center will present a “Mestres do Forró Nordestino” show at Damrosch Park, preceded by dance lessons. That will be followed on Saturday by a forró show at Battery Park, with even more forró in store at the annual Brasil Summerfest, which this year runs from July 21 through 28. All of that is in addition to half a dozen clubs in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens that now regularly feature live forró (pronounced for-HOE) music.

“This genre is just blowing up in New York right now,” said Hap Pardo, the office manager and booking agent for the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, which this spring instituted a forró night on Mondays. “It’s a younger, up-and-coming thing, and we wanted to be part of it. Some of my friends have been doing capoeira,” a Brazilian art form that mixes dance and martial arts, “and that branched them out into this new scene. They see forró as a form of exercise while also having fun.” . . .

But the boomlet in New York also seems propelled by the desire of young music consumers for something that sounds new and exotic but which you can still dance to in the old-fashioned way — close and tight. That parallels the genre’s evolution in Brazil, where about a decade ago sophisticated college-age urbanites adopted and adapted the old, rough-hewn sound, polishing it into a style now known as “university forró.”

“This is really vivacious music, fun and easy to dance to,” Michelle Gelker, 28, a first-time visitor to the Cafe Wha?, said this month as the band Forró Forevis played a driving, energetic two-step. “Anybody can do it. I will definitely come back and bring friends with me.” . . .

“In our region of Brazil you grow up hearing this music, so it’s in our blood, our DNA, even if you’re a rock ’n’ roller,” said the group’s leader, Cláudio Rabeca, 37. “But we can’t deny that we live in a city where we’ve come into contact with modern music from all over the world. We’ve all heard the Beatles, heavy metal and Afropop, so it’s impossible to make music that does not have those influences.”

As a dance form, forró is descended from the quadrille, a medieval French style that later made its way to Portugal. “But Brazil being Brazil, it became more sensual in its movements” once it arrived there, said Liliana Araújo, a forró singer and dance teacher who offers instruction before her monthly performances at S.O.B.’s and will also be giving the lesson at Friday night’s Lincoln Center show.

“People danced closer,” she explained. “It was still a two-step here and a two-step there, but many other movements and maneuvers were added.”

Forró also bears a superficial resemblance to salsa, Ms. Araújo added, in that both genres are meant to “make you move your body, raise some dust and leave you sweaty and smiling.”

But Mr. Refosco, whose band has a Wednesday night residency at Nublu in the East Village whenever he’s not on the road playing percussion for Red Hot Chili Peppers or Thom Yorke’s band Atoms for Peace, stressed that forró is more inclusive and informal than salsa, and easier to dance. . . .

“We gauge the success of what we’re doing by whether people are up and dancing or not. If they are, it tells us the music is working. And if they aren’t, it tells us it isn’t.” . . . .

“Forró is music that was originally played in homes, at parties, in small places where people who were farm laborers, bricklayers or maids were encouraged to dance,” he said. “You can’t dismember the music from the dancing, they’re totally linked, and we want to communicate that to American audiences. So we’re going to bring along big placards with messages to that effect written out in English, and show them from the stage. It can’t be just the thing of the music. It has to have the dance too.”