When I spoke with Valerie Day and John Smith of the group Nu Shooz by phone last week, it was 39 years to the day since their first live appearance, a gig at Colonel Summers Park in their hometown of Portland, Oregon. Coming from Portland and making dance music at that time was a long shot. There were plenty of other bands in town, but no one else playing around with the beat-making potential of the new Roland synthesizers the way that Smith was or adding Latin percussion to the mix as Day did. “Portland didn’t have a lot of funk at that point,” said Day, but the duo stuck with it, and each other, eventually getting married and issuing the first Nu Shooz LP in 1982. Through the support of Portland’s top radio deejay, Gary Bryan of KKRZ “Z100,” the group scored a regional hit with a catchy dance number called “I Can’t Wait.”
Things might have ended there if not for the intense demand in nightclubs from New York to Miami, Los Angeles, and beyond for dance music that appealed across a cultural spectrum that included both hip-hop and Latin. A “Dutch mix” of their song made its way from Amsterdam to New York, and the next thing they knew, Nu Shooz had an international hit, a full band, and a recording contract and were dancing and singing “I Can’t Wait” on the syndicated television program Solid Gold.
That distinctive sound, with its slinky synth bass lines, perky pop vocals, and irresistible conga clavé rhythms came to be known as “freestyle,” a catchall term for dance tracks that follow a similar sonic pattern and fit comfortably in the 125-132 beats-per-minute (BPM) range. On Saturday, July 7, when the artists on the Freestyle Explosion tour hit the stage at the Santa Barbara Bowl, the audience will be up and dancing from the opening notes until the last synthesized snares and skittering drum samples have faded away.