SalsaDelic Black+Red Valentine Party - Bar Escape, Coventry
Written by JoJo
Monday, 25 February 2008
SalsaDelic’s Black and Red Valentines Party at Bar Escape, Coventry on Sunday 17th February was originally scheduled to be one of the regular monthly Canley Club events on Saturday 16th February, but due to a problem at the Canley Club the event was switched to a different day and venue. The event now also had a different schedule to that of a normal Canley Club event i.e. it had a late afternoon start at 3pm and was set to finish at 10pm. There was and hour’s DJ set at 3pm, followed by two hours of classes from 4-6pm.Dancing was then from 6-10pm with DJ GG and two sets from live band The Salsa Amigos, the first of which was at 6.30pm.Entrance was £8 including classes or £7 for dancing only. Bar Escape is housed in The Old Fire Station, Hales Street, Coventry CV1 1JA which is a modern, trendy city centre bar.It made a nice change to have a salsa gig in a venue of this type rather than the usual village/church hall type venues that are more common.I loved the venue which was nicely decorated, had floor to ceiling windows along the front of it, and had a fab sound system.
We thought the late afternoon start with the earlier than normal finish was a great idea - with potentially up to 4 hours of dancing you were getting the same amount of dancing as at other gigs but the early finish on a ‘school night’ meant a decent night’s sleep before work on Monday. We arrived at around 5.30pm so were able to watch the last half hour or so of the final classes which were being taken by the SalsaDelic Team.The classes were very well attended – so much so that we could barely squeeze past the dancers to get to the small seating area at the opposite end of the venue.The classes finished pretty much on time and the dancing started to DJ GG’s second set of the afternoon.
The music was great, dancefloor (which ran pretty much the whole length of the room) was good and the sound system was fab, but strangely many of the people that had been in the classes soon seemed to disappear into thin air.Maybe as they’d been there since 3pm they decided they’d done enough, or perhaps they had children etc to get back to – who knows. Some of the people that had disappeared were replaced by people arriving just for the dancing, and they were just in the nick of time as the band’s first set was about to begin, about ½ an hour late. The band was a group of professional jazz musicians who have decided to turn their hands to salsa.They have been learning some well known salsa tracks to go with some of their own compositions, together with some other well known songs which they have ‘salsafied’.I thought they did a pretty good job of it overall and the singer had a great voice.I especially liked their version of the very well known U2/Coco Freeman track :o)There were a couple of tracks that were more on the jazzy side, so as latin jazz isn’t really my thing I didn’t enjoy these so much, but in general I thought they did a fairly good mix.If they can add a few more well known salsa tracks to their repertoire I think they have potential to do well in the future.
Their first set was followed by another DJ set, and then the band came back on for their 2nd set around 8.30pm.By this time more people had started to leave and the dancers were becoming a little sparse.We decided to call it a night about half way through the band’s 2nd set. In theory the idea of this event was a fab one I thought, but for some reason it just didn’t seem to draw the numbers that it deserved.It’s a well known fact that the majority of experienced dancers are somewhat ‘nocturnal’ and in general don’t tend to arrive at gigs until 11pm onwards, so maybe getting them out of this habit was too tall an order, despite the fact that they would have been getting the same amount of dancing time. This is a fantastic venue for salsa with a good dancefloor and great sound system, so it was a real shame that this event wasn’t as well attended as the normal Canley Club events.However, SalsaDelic hold weekly classes at Bar Escape on Monday nights, so if you are local to Coventry or fancy travelling out of Birmingham for some classes I can recommend this venue. For more details visit the SalsaDelic website www.salsadelic.com
