At 9 p.m. on a breezy Thursday at The Boat Yard at Tobay Beach, the dance floor is packed with 40- and 50-somethings grooving to the freestyle music that was the soundtrack to their teens and 20s. As DJ Tommy Nappi spins, and they anticipate a live performance by Alisha ("All Night Passion"; "Baby Talk"), they dance, drink, laugh and meet new people, just like they did in the clubs in the late '80s, before cellphones and internet dating.

To some, freestyle music is a mysterious, somewhat ill-defined blip on the global dance radar, a brief New York-based Latin-inflected hip-hop electronic dance interlude between the dramatic death of disco and the dance-pop tsunami.

But to thousands of Long Islanders, many of whom, like freestyle itself, migrated from the boroughs, the music feels as fres

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