Pickathon 2012: Los Cojolites
Posted by Aaron Sharpsteen
Los Cojolites at Pickathon 2012. Photo by Aaron Sharpsteen
Los Cojolites brought the music of the Veracruz region of Mexico to Pickathon’s main stages on Sunday night, and the audience didn’t seem to know how to react. One gets the feeling that the music was supposed to inspire dancing, but besides a couple pockets here and there, the crowd remained mostly still, leading to an awkward feeling, which was a shame. Moving from the front of the stage to the middle of the crowd, one of the reasons for this possibility was that the main production of percussion, a woman dancing on a hollowed out platform of wood, was drowned out in the mix, so the crowd mostly heard the multiple string players with no underlying rhythm to tie it together. This is not to say the performance wasn’t excellent, but it could have been a lot better if the crowd was a little more into it, as they seemed to be on Friday night, when Los Cojolites played the first time. Respect is owed to those heroic and intoxicated crowd members who tried their best to get their peers into the act with some sporadic hand-clapping, although it was to no avail.
