Dinner tables are being cleared following the evening’s opening act, Café Olé, a four-piece flamenco-influenced jazz ensemble led by a sultry Spanish vocalist and dancer. A wave of patrons moves down to the dance floor to take part in the club’s weekly salsa lesson, led by an impossibly gorgeous woman with mocha skin, big hair, painted-on jeans, 10-storey stilettos and perfectly rolled “Rs.” Willing victims face each other in long rows, stiff limbs gradually giving way to limper wrists and looser hips. “One-two-three, cha-cha-cha,” the salsa goddess soothingly intones.
By the time Lady Son Y Articulo Veinte — the 10-piece headlining act — takes the stage, the neophytes are giving way to the hardcore rug-cutters. Yet despite the general competence on the dance floor, the crowd is not monolithically Latino. Nor does the scene have the intimidation factor familiar to anyone who’s ever ventured out to the city’s other salsa clubs, none of which feature live music as Lula does.
The band’s singer, “Lady Son,” a.k.a. Yeti Ajasin, perhaps best personifies the cultural eclecticism that is Lula Lounge’s hallmark. In technical terms, Ajasin is what one might refer to as “a whole lotta woman,” not simply for her sensual physical presence, but for the commanding way her husky tenor seeps into every corner of the room. Born to Nigerian-Italian parents, Ajasin is a black Jew with hip-length blonde cornrows who simply fell in love with Cuban son. Her band has only one Latin musician. The rest hearken from places ranging from the Ukraine to North York, and yet it’s some of the best Cuban music this side of Havana.
These days, Lula Lounge is less of a nightclub than a social experiment in progress. If the U.N. shed its political aspirations and simply ran a community centre, this would be it. Forget quotas, forget affirmative action, forget earnest, politically correct propagandist brochures with soothing images of “our cultural mosaic.” In the nearly five years it has been around (its anniversary is this May) Lula has become a magnet for musicians, employees and audiences of every ethnic stripe. The convergence of all this talent has meant a cross-pollination of musical genres that could only happen in a city with Toronto’s diverse cultural pedigree.
The décor is equally polyglot: a massive Chinese lantern dominates the dance floor while tables are draped with colourful Indian fabrics. Stained glass candles evoke a Moroccan mystique. It’s a far cry from the venue’s previous incarnation as “Hollywood Nights” — a Portuguese sports bar whose owner’s dreams, like that of so many tinsel town actors, went unrealized.
The same goes for the staff and the audience. There are no minorities, but there is also no majority: from the Brazilian coat-check girls to the South African Muslim Sound Consultant to the football-crazed British chef to the bodybuilding Persian bouncer. The bartender, a Cuban defector, engages in frequent, heated debates with two of the wait staff, self-proclaimed communists hailing from North Toronto.
It’s the music that people come for. It could be said that what’s happening on stage is emblematic of a city finally making use of its strengths, yet the beauty of it is the unselfconscious way it’s all unfurling. New York has world music club S.O.B’s, but, before Lula, there were few places in Toronto for the burgeoning immigrant — call it local/global — music scene. And yet when realtor José Nieves and friend José Ortega (known by all as simply “the Josés”) originally bought the place back in 2002, they had little ambition beyond finding a bigger home for the weekly potluck salsa parties that had outgrown the loft space where they still live, just half a block from the club.
Ecuadorian-born, New York-bred Ortega has another life as an internationally-acclaimed artist. Among other accolades, he was asked by the U.S. Postal Service to design a salsa stamp last year. A warm, diminutive man with charm to burn, he still seems amazed by what has happened. He admits that neither he nor Nieves particularly has a head for business. Although the club is on more solid financial footing these days, there’s still a sense that the Josés are flying by the seat of their pants. “For us it was about supporting different layers of the community where we lived. There was absolutely no plan. We never discussed anything. In the end, we just literally opened our doors and people came,” Ortega muses.
And they’re still coming. This month there’s a night of Punjabi folksongs, a Purim Mardi-Gras cabaret, and a classical Persian New Year’s concert. Lula also hosts frequent fundraisers. In March there’s one for Gaza organized by a Palestinian/Jewish association and another in support of African children whose parents have died of HIV/AIDS. Nor does the club shy away from the political, having taken a vocal stance in support of U.S. war resisters, several of which still frequent the premises. A number of regular acts include defectors from Cuba, many of them world–class musicians.
Minerva and Tadao, a middle-aged couple from the Phillipines and Japan respectively, have been fixtures at the club every weekend for the past three years. Their dress is sharp but informal: he in an open-collared grey suit and she in a shimmering gold sleeveless top. On the dance floor they are mesmerizing, but it’s the smiles on their faces you notice the most: They look like they’re having a fantastic time. Tadao grumbles that other, more traditional salsa clubs shunned them because they’re Asian, not Latino. Minerva dismisses this, saying only: “As soon as we walked in the door, we felt at home. They welcome everybody here.”
It seems the club is doing what few government programs ever seem to manage: building bridges between communities. Sufficiently so that an ethnomusicology professor from Humber College and one of his students have decided to study what’s happening here. At least two new bands have been formed as a direct result of connections made at Lula. Others, such as the fabled Gryphon Trio, have written site-specific classical music for the venue that capitalizes on available local talent.
Lula also gets its share of big international acts. On the coattails of her first massive Grammy win, Norah Jones held a private concert here to launch her second album. Other major acts followed, including Brazil’s Seu Jorge, South Africa’s Mahotella Queens, not to mention popular rock acts Sloan, Broken Social Scene, and Metric.
Jowi Taylor, the host of CBC Radio’s world music program Global Village, lives near the club. He sums it up nicely: “I really think that whole vibe, the sense of play and irony they have in the design — little bits of Honest Ed’s, Mexican wrestling and Twin Peaks — and the off-the-beaten-track location are all fundamental to what makes the place so special musically. Nobody is under the microscope there. Nobody is being measured for how cool they are there . . . I've seen some of my favourite-ever performances there, both from locals and international visitors and I think it’s because people feel comfortable there. The atmosphere is very conducive to collaboration for all of those reasons.”
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