4 years of Lazy Afternoons
There are those who go to dance clubs to stand still and be seen.
But if you’re there to dance, thank Daniel Venegas. During the past four years, his Lazy Afternoon parties have offered a smart but sweaty alternative to the expensive, overblown nightclubs of downtown Orlando, bringing a diverse crowd — and big-name DJs — to stomp it out to oldschool soul and hip-hop in smaller venues.
This weekend, Venegas’ blowout climbs to the rooftop bar at Aero for Lazy Afternoon’s fourth anniversary celebration, just up the stairs from the scene of the very first gig at Eye Spy. Like The Peacock Room, Substance and many of the other venues that hosted Lazy Afternoon, Eye Spy is gone (replaced by The Patio). But Venegas’ gypsy party shows no signs of slowing down.
The early 2011 shows at Eye Spy were daytime gigs — and anything but lazy. Named for a series of mixtapes from fellow DJ Y-Not, Lazy Afternoon began as an attempt to capture the free-wheeling energy and eclectic playlist Venegas had felt and heard at warehouse parties in New York and Miami.
Venegas’ enthusiasm served him well in 2011, when he noticed that Questlove’s band The Roots were slated to play at Universal Studios Orlando. After some persistent calling to booking agents, Venegas was as surprised as anyone when Questlove agreed to DJ a Lazy Afternoon show at the downtown nightclub Boss during his stay.
He was even more surprised when Boss’ management canceled the show a week before the date. But the reason for the cancellation, Venegas recalls, “was like a punch in the stomach.”
“They tell us who’s double-booked and why we can’t do it there, and it’s Snooki,” the party-girl star of MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” whose vapid vibe was the poison Lazy Afternoon had been created to cure.
After much scrambling, the show not only went on at Cleo’s Lounge in downtown Orlando, it sold out. Questlove would go on to praise the Orlando scene and return for a three-night residency at The Social in 2014.
In the years in between, Lazy Afternoon’s roster of guest DJs has read like a who’s who of old-school tastemakers: Rich Medina, Pete Rock, Maseo and Joseph Anthony Hernandez, who will DJ Lazy Afternoon’s anniversary bash under his nom-de-hip-hop Tony Touch.
Hernandez knows better than most how far Orlando has come. Before he earned his nickname in the Brooklyn b-boy scene, he was break dancing and taking DJ gigs at long-lost clubs such as Electric Avenue in Orlando during his days as a West Orange High School senior.
“Next to Miami, [Orlando] is the biggest
ECTOR JAVIER scene in Florida,” said Hernandez. “There’s a nice dance community and there’s still a lot of breakers out there. The rap scene, the whole DJ scene out there is big. It’s all there.”