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Dance Factory

Sean Quinn can’t dance. It’s ironic given that he’s the man in charge of what might be the best little DIY dance night in town, a weekly rave-up at ZuZu in Central Square devoted to classic soul, funk, and R&B called Soul-le-lu-jah. Not that I’m one to talk. Last Saturday night, Quinn and I found ourselves shoulder-to-shoulder wallflowers, awkwardly swaying and shimmying to the warm, scratchy sounds of Eli “Paperboy” Reed’s 45 collection. Reed, who’s known around town as a howling, guitar-slinging blues manchild, is part of Quinn’s ever-growing cadre of rotating DJs. But when I looked around the packed and sweaty room — at the guy to my right doing some sort of weird interpretation of the twist, at the girl to my left shaking her hands high above her head with abandon — I realized that this wasn’t the place to worry about looking cool, that I had to give in to the power of the music and let myself go. Soul-le-lu-jah has had that effect on a growing number of scenesters. On any given Saturday night you’ll find an eclectic crowd packing ZuZu not just to dance the night away but to receive what amounts to a rock-and-roll history lesson.

The 31-year-old Quinn’s enthusiasm for classic soul is infectious. He says he’s tried to build the night into a place where people like himself feel comfortable letting their guards down and, well, just getting down. “There’s no ego; it’s not about a scene; it’s not about what you’re wearing,” he tells me when I meet up with him and DJ PJ Gray, who’s been involved with the night since its inception, for brunch at Cambridge’s Miracle of Science. “Come down, have a beer, and just dance” — that’s the Soul-le-lu-jah sales pitch.

Carrie D’Amour (a/k/a Miss Firecracker of Lata Gata Negra League of Masked Lady Wrestlers) started Soul-le-lu-jah in May 2003. And she agrees. She points to the near-universal appeal of “good, raw, and honest soul music” as fostering an inclusive environment. “Everybody can find something to shake to [the Temptations’] ‘I Can’t Get Next to You,’ can’t they?” she says via e-mail.

D’Amour, who’s no longer involved with Soul-le-lu-jah, says she started the night not out of any great ambition to be a DJ but because “I got sick of having to travel to NYC every month just to be able to spend the night dancing to classic soul.” Originally spelled “Soul-A-Lujah,” after the song by the Stax supergroup of Johnnie Taylor, Eddie Floyd, William Bell, Carla Thomas, and Pervis, Mavis, and Cleotha Staples that appeared on the 1969 Boy Meets Girl compilation (one of D’Amour’s staple tracks), it started as a bi-weekly happening and ran as such for a little over a year.