Meet the house D.J. of the Bernie Sanders campaign

NYT Politics ?@nytpolitics 4m4 minutes ago
Meet the house D.J. of the Bernie Sanders campaign http://nyti.ms/1PJoZ1P by @jasondhorowitz




CONCORD, N.H. — Standing between a wall of retracted wooden bleachers and his turntables, Mel Sandico, a.k.a. Mel Cavaricci, a.k.a. D.J. Mel, looked up to survey the crowd filing into Senator Bernie Sanders’s New Hampshire victory party last Tuesday night.

“Can you hold on one sec?” he said, putting on his headphones, inspecting his laptop and playing a Roy Ayers hit. “We’re just kind of easing in.”

Ayers, the Delfonics, Southside Movement and other soul singers who provided the samples for hip-hop classics are pretty much what you would expect in the playlist of a guy wearing a Reigning Champ black hoodie under a Patagonia vest, a pair of Naked & Famous jeans over Air Jordan 1s, and a Supreme black cap over his clear framed glasses and fashionable beard.

Less so from a presidential campaign. And yet Mr. Sandico has become the house D.J. of Mr. Sanders’s parties, playing a mix of soul, funk and disco that is in equal parts laid-back lounge bar, alternative college radio and dancey early ’90s bar mitzvah...

Mr. Sandico, “Notoriously recognized as “Obama’s DJ,” as per his website, has helped Mr. Sanders do that. He played the ballroom of the Holiday Inn Airport hotel in Des Moines on the night Mr. Sanders barely lost the Iowa caucuses. Last Tuesday, Mr. Sandico, who says he is 40, played the Concord High School gym in New Hampshire, the state where Mr. Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton by more than 20 percentage points.

It remains to be seen whether he will take a break from his day job as a D.J. for University of Texas athletic events to man the ones and twos at Mr. Sanders’s election-night watch party on February 20 in Nevada, where he regularly plays at the Cosmopolitan hotel on the Las Vegas Strip...

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/fashion/the-house-dj-of-the-bernie-sanders-campaign.html?partner=rss&emc=rss