A Unifying Beat

Without knowing the exact address of AVA, the relatively new lounge at 126 South Highland Avenue might be easy to miss. The dark awning hanging over its doorway dwarves the name, which is painted in the lower right corner of the front window, in letters just a few inches tall. At a quick glance, its façade looks similar to many storefronts in this transitional neighborhood. But walk by on the weekend, and it points to the future of this ever-evolving area.

On this last Saturday in February, Brazilian dance music blares onto the street as patrons work their way through the door. The throng of bodies — nearly 200 by the end of the night — adds extra heat to the packed room. The décor has yet to be completed, says Justin Strong, who along with Tim Guthrie, runs AVA as well the Shadow Lounge, the seven-year old venue around the corner on Baum Boulevard which connects to AVA via the back hallway. Seating is minimal. Besides a few streamers, the only decoration comes in the form of four candles, mounted a few feet from each other in glass cases along the left wall, which like the rest of the room is painted black. Yet, all of this is secondary to el ritmo that Carla Leininger is spinning from the DJ booth in the back of the room.

Global Beats, which takes place the last Saturday of every month, features dance music not only from Leininger’s native Brazil, but from countries around the world, juxtaposing Arabic music with grooves from Turkey, Venezuela and Iran, to list but a few. The theme of tonight’s event celebrates the Brazilian Carnival, emphasized by the video of lavish parade in Rio projected on the wall. As women in beaded headdresses slink across the wall, women in crop tops on the dance floor fling their arms in the air and chant along with the foreign songs. One couple dances more suggestively with each new song while an ethnically diverse crowd, dressed in everything from ball caps and baggy pants to suits, comes together for the pulsating music and atmosphere.

An International Community

Leininger created Global Beats in 2004. A host of the weekly “Brazilian Radio Hour” on WRCT-FM 88.3, she launched the event at a club in the Strip District. “I saw a lot of people from the international community at Déjà Vu, and asked had they ever considered doing anything there in terms of a World Music night,” she says.

For the next year and half, Global Beats took place at Déjà Vu during the week, first on Wednesdays and later Thursdays. To welcome people of various ethnicities, Leininger contacted different community groups, such as Carnegie Mellon’s Columbia en Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Venezuelan Association, for assistance in programming the music. (Leininger also has her own Brazilian Pittsburgh website for natives: www.arrepiabrasil.org.) Other informal groups have contributed to evenings that featured Arabic and Persian music. “I can’t claim to know everything about World Music,” she says, modestly. “I need someone who’s involved with the culture too.”

Each Global Beats party has a theme, which makes up half of the evening’s music, with music from other countries blended mixed together for the rest of the set. “It tends to be the music that the youth in their [native] country are listening to when they go out dancing,” Leininger says. “I think a lot of people think of it as folk music, which it isn’t. I want to play whatever it is they’d be listening to, not what their grandparents would be listening to.” While some World Music has the potential to take its bare music essentials, reduce them to an elemental nature and mix it with a generic, programmed beat, the music at Global Beats maintains the exciting quality of the traditional music even as it takes on a modern identity.

Leininger took a break from Global Beats in early 2006 when a job change gave her less time during weeknights. Strong, of the Shadow Lounge, encouraged her to set up shop each month after she helped promote a concert through the Brazilian Radio Hour. AVA had been open a month at that time, but she was ready to pick up where she left off.

AVA’s location borders Shadyside, East Liberty and Highland Park, an area that has grown by leaps and bounds since Strong opened the Shadow Lounge in 2000. Kelly’s Bar and Lounge on South Penn Circle, as well as the restaurants Abay and the Red Room Cafe, are drawing more people to the neighborhood, and Strong says events like Global Beats add to it by fulfilling a need no one else is addressing. “Pittsburgh is far behind as far as providing a true diverse selection of entertainment and an infrastructure and support of different cultures moving into Pittsburgh,” he says. “A lot of times, it’s very black and white and if you’re anything but that, sometimes you don’t feel as welcomed or tolerated. We want to provide a platform that says this is supported and celebrated. At the same time, hopefully we’ll boost the global population moving into this area.”

While some critics might be skeptical of the ability to draw either a large or ethnically diverse clientele, Strong says the proof can be seen on a regular basis. “You could take a snapshot of the block, from Kelly’s to the Red Room to Shadow Lounge to AVA. This is the population segment that people say doesn’t exist is Pittsburgh,” he says. “Every venue and every bar and every restaurant is packed. They’re very different audiences coexisting on one block. So it’s kind of like a glimpse into the new direction that Pittsburgh’s moving.”

Leininger calls herself “a DJ who would rather be dancing” so she comes to a Global Beats night prepared. “I’ll spend days listening and putting my music into my playlist, listening to how they’re mixing, trying to stay within the same beat,” she says. “Then I have to dance to it so make sure it’s danceable.”

While she wants to people to have a good time and hear their music, she also hopes the evening exposes them to new musical horizons. “You try to go around the world in music,” she explains. “So it’s really for people who are very open-minded and really want a taste of diversity in music.”

One installment of Global Beats reached towards another ideal inherent in the party’s agenda: world peace. After Leininger programmed Arabic music as a theme, she began to wonder if conflicts in the Middle East might spill over onto the dancefloor. To her surprise, the night drew a lot of peaceful Palestinians, and at the end of the night, she was complemented on the great party — by an Israeli. “I had no idea until that moment that I had an Israel and Palestinians on the dance floor,” she says.

Mike Shanley's writing appears nationally in music magazines JazzTimes and Harp. A Pittsburgh-based writer, he is the bassist in Amoeba Knieval and has played in many bands, including the Mofones and Bone of Contention.

Tim Guthrie and Carla Leininger at AVA's entrance

All photographs courtesy of Carla Leininger and Global Beats
except photos of Tim, Carla and Justin © Renee Rosensteel