Amsterdam 09-10-2007

Ziezo......
hebben jullie wat te lezen en het is nog interessant ook voor de liefhebbers ;-)

HISTORY OF HOUSE:
Jesse Saunders History and definition of House Music

WHY IT'S CALLED HOUSE MUSIC - the name comes from a now defunct club called the Warehouse in Chicago. It's attendees were so enthralled by the to the grooving, soulful style of Disco that resident DJ Frankie Knuckles played there, that they shortened Warehouse to House and birthed the moniker House Music. Frankie played Philly Disco and Garage-type Disco from New York, where he was from originally for a mostly gay crowd of about 250 people on Saturday nights. When myself and other DJs started playing this music for the much bigger and straight crowd on the Southside (about 500 to 1,000 people), the name stuck because a few of them used to go to the Warehouse and had heard the music before.
All the other myths of entitlement, that it was given that name because it was music played at private homes or house parties, or Farley "Jackmaster" Funk and Chip E. saying that they came up with the term are all false!
However, a distinction must be made between music that was played at the Warehouse in the late 1970's and early 1980's, which was really Disco music, and House Music that we know and love today, which was originated by myself with the pioneering efforts of: Frankie Knuckles, who gave me the inspiration to fall in love with Warehouse music; Wayne Williams, who initiated me into the DJ world; Vince Lawrence, who showed me how to manufacture records and co-wrote most of the early hits, and Farley "Jackmaster" Funk. Without him, Armando Rivera, Lee Michaels and the "Hot Mix 5" radio show, House Music might never have had a commercial voice.
I, Jesse Saunders, am the originator, not the creator of House Music. By origination I mean that I started a sound with a lot of different ingredients, but was derived with the help of other influences (time, place, people, etc.). Creation in this sense would mean I alone made something without the help of anything else, and that's not true. If there was no Frankie Knuckles, and no Vince Lawrence, and no Farley "Jackmaster" Funk along with the Hot Mix 5 (Farley was just the outspoken one of the group), no Paul Weisburg (owner of Importes Etc. the first truly dedicated 12" dance music store in Chicago) to buy and sell my first House records, and no Larry Sherman to exploit it (even though he didn't do it legitimately) the sound would not have been created.
All collectively set the groundwork for what we know today as House Music. So in a sense we all created it, including all of the producers and songwriters in the ingredient artforms, but I was the one to put the ingredients together to originate what we know today as House Music.
What I did was take a lot of influences that I had over my lifetime, starting with Classic Rock, Jazz (although I didn't know it at the time, the influence came from my Mom who was a pianist and vocalist), Gospel, Rhythm & Blues (groups like Heatwave, Isley Bros, etc. who had a mesmerizing groove) and believe it or not Electronica, which in those days was coming mostly from Italy (groups like Alexander Robotnic and Dr.'s Cat) and Germany (Kraftwerk), and put them all together like a sort of Gumbo which eventually led to my first recording "Fantasy", and later on "On & On", which beat the release of "Fantasy" by about 2 weeks..... And that's the "Real Story" of House Music!
Jesse Saunders is a music and film producer, record company executive, DJ and radio show host. He is also credited with having made the first ever "House" record entitled "On & On" on his upstart label Jes Say Records in Chicago (1983). Jesse has since gone on to become one of the world's most renowned DJ/Producer/Remixers. Find out more at his website, JustSayPro.com
The History Of House Music by Phil Cheeseman
It's been ten years since the first identifiably house tracks were put on to vinyl,
ten years which have changed the technology behind the electronic music revolution
beyond recognition but left the basic structure of house intact.
It's seven years since it was being said house couldn't last, that it was just hi-NRG,
a fast blast that would wither as quickly as it had started.
But then the music reinvented itself, and then again and again until it gradually
dawned on people that house wasn't just another phase of club culture, it was club
culture, the continuing future of dance music. The reason? It's simple.
People like to dance to house.
The roots to 1985
Like it or not, house was first and foremost a direct descendant of disco. Disco
had already been going for ten years when the first electronic drum tracks began
to appear out of Chicago, and in that time it had already suffered the slings and
arrows of merciless commercial exploitation, dilution and racial and sexual
prejudice which culminated in the 'disco sucks' campaign. In one bizarrely
extreme incident, people attending a baseball game in Chicago's Komishi Park were
invited to bring all their unwanted disco records and after the game they were
tossed onto a massive bonfire. Disco eventually collapsed under a heaving weight
of crass disco versions of pop records and an ever-increasing volume of records
that were simply no good. But the underground scene had already stepped off and
was beginning to develop a new style that was deeper, rawer and more designed to
make people dance. Disco had already produced the first records to be aimed
specifically at DJs with extended 12" versions that included long percussion
breaks for mixing purposes and the early eighties proved a vital turning point.
Sinnamon's 'Thanks To You', D-Train's 'You're The One For Me' and The Peech Boys'
'Don't Make Me Wait', a record that's been continually sampled over the last
decade, took things in a different direction with their sparse, synthesized
sounds that introduced dub effects and drop-outs that had never been heard
before. But it wasn't just American music laying the groundwork for house. European
music, spanning English electronic pop like Depeche Mode and Soft Cell and the
earlier, more disco based sounds of Giorgio Moroder, Klein & MBO and a thousand
Italian productions were immensely popular in urban areas like New York and
Chicago. One of the reasons for their popularity was two clubs that had
simultaneously broken the barriers of race and sexual preference, two clubs that
were to pass on into dance music legend - Chicago's Warehouse and New York's
Paradise Garage. Up until then, and after, the norm was for Black, Hispanic,
White, straight and gay to segregate themselves, but with the Warehouse, opened
in 1977 and presided over by Frankie Knuckles and the Garage where Larry Levan
spun, the emphasis was on the music. (Ironically, Levan was first choice for the
Warehouse, but he didn't want to leave New York). And the music was as varied as
the clienteles - r'n'b based Black dance music and disco peppered with things as
diverse as The Clash's 'Magnificent Seven'. For most people, these were the
places that acted as breeding grounds for the music that eventually came to be
known after the clubs - house and garage. Right from the start there was a difference in approach between New York and
Chicago. "All of the records coming out of New York had been either mid or down
tempo, and the kids in Chicago wouldn't do that all night long, they needed more
energy" commented Frankie Knuckles after his move to Chicago. The Windy City was
seduced to a far greater extent by the European sound and when the records
started to come, it showed. Whereas garage in New York evolved more smoothly
from First Choice and the labels Salsoul, West End and Prelude, there was no such
evolution in Chicago. Opinions still differ as to what the first house record
was, but it was certainly made by Jessie Saunders and it was on the Mitchball
label - probably Z Factor's 'Fantasy', but there was also another Z Factor tune
which went by the name of 'I Like To Do It In Fast Cars'. 'Fantasy' sounds
extremely dated now but ten years ago it was like a sound from another planet,
with echoes of Kraftwerk's heavily synthesized string sounds, a Eurobeat bassline
and a simple, insistent drum machine pattern. Suffice to say, the record remained
obscure outside the close-knit urban Chicago scene. "Those records didn't really motivate people" says Adonis, one of the early
producers on the Chicago scene. "The first was Jamie Principle's 'Waiting On
Your Angel'. See, before there were records there were cassettes, and that was
the hottest thing in Chicago. It was so hot Jessie Saunders went in and recorded
that track word for word, note for note, and put it out on Larry Sherman's label
Precision. It was so influential that four or five records came out that took its
sounds." Within a year though, others were fast joining. Saunders, who by then
had come out with his Jes-Say label, with Farley Keith (or Farley 'Jackmaster'
Funk) getting in on the act. Frankie Knuckles, who had already done some remixes
for Salsoul was also beginning to work on his own productions. By 1985 it was
clear that something big was beginning to stir. Ron Hardy, who was to become the
backbone of the Chicago club scene by consistently breaking the new records,
began playing at The Music Box around the same time as Frankie Knuckles left The
Warehouse, and other DJs like Farley and the Hot Mix 5 who threw down the mix
shows on the radio station WBMX were making names for themselves. But making a
record wasn't the priority for most of the DJs at the time - they were making
music specifically to play at the clubs and the parties that were beginning to
spring up in the city. Larry Heard and Robert Owens, later to be known as
Fingers Inc, and Steve Hurley were all experimenting with basic rhythm tracks
long before they made the jump to vinyl. "I started dabbling in making my own music." says Hurley. "Just making tracks to
play as a DJ, not really thinking as far as producing - more to do with just
having something to play that nobody else had. And one of these tracks, 'Music
Is The Key', got such a good response that I decided to borrow some money and go
in with another guy, who happened to be Rocky Jones, and put the record out." That momentous occasion was the beginning of DJ International Records, one of the
two labels that was to give all the aspiring producers in the city a chance to
get their music on to vinyl. The other, Larry Sherman's Trax Records was already
up and running, though to begin with Sherman was attempting to break into a more
commercial market with Precision. 'Music Is The Key' (the first house record to
include a rap, incidentally) took house on a step by incorporating more musical
elements and a vocal, and by the time Chip E's 'Like This', also on DJ
International, appeared house had discovered real vocals and the sampled stutter
technique that's such an integral part of dub remixes today. "It took a little
while for the sound to develop" remembers London DJ Jazzy M, who worked in a
record shop at the time and was one of the very first to get house on the radio
in Britain with his immensely popular Jackin' Zone show on London pirate station
LWR. "When 'Like This' and Adonis' 'No Way Back' came out, that's when it picked
up. At first it was just drum machine programs and they were called trax, like
there was Chip E Trax and Kenny Jason Trax and that's what house was, with maybe
a few dodgy samples. I can remember talking to Colin Faver, who was one of the
first DJs here to get into it, about 'Like This' and we were both really excited
by it." Meanwhile, things were gathering pace over in New York though the development was
a lot slower. Mixers like Larry Levan, Tony Humphries, Timmy Regisford and Boyd
Jarvis, who came straight after Shep Pettibone and Jellybean Benitez were making
ground as remixers, and fired by the raw club sound of Colonel Abrams, the deep,
soulful club sound that became known as garage was taking shape with early
releases on the Supertonics, Easy Street and Ace Beat labels. Paul Scott was one
of the first with 'Off The Wall' in 1985 but before that there was Serious
Intention's deep dub classic 'You Don't Know' and even before that was World
Premiere's 'Share The Night'.
1986
While Frankie Knuckles had laid the groundwork for house at the Warehouse, it was
to be another DJ from the gay scene that was really to create the environment for
the house explosion - Ron Hardy. Where Knuckles' sound was still very much based
in disco, Hardy was the DJ that went for the rawest, wildest rhythm tracks he
could find and he made The Music Box the inspirational temple for pretty much
every DJ and producer that was to come out of the Chicago scene. He was also the
DJ to whom the producers took their very latest tracks so they could test the
reaction on the dance floor. Larry Heard was one of those people. "People would bring their tracks on tape and the DJ would play spin them in. It
was part of the ritual, you'd take the tape and see the crowd reaction. I never
got the chance to take my own stuff because Robert (Owens) would always get there
first." "The Music Box was underground " remembers Adonis. "You could go there in the
middle of the winter and it'd be as hot as hell, people would be walking around
with their shirts off. Ron Hardy had so much power people would be praising his
name while he was playing, and I've got the tapes to prove it! "The difference between Frankie and Ronnie was that people weren't making records
when Frankie was playing, though all the guys who would become the next DJs were
there checking him out. It was The Music Box that really inspired people. I went
there one night and the next day I was in the studio making 'No Way Back' " In
1985 the records were few and far between. By 1986 the trickle had turned to a
flood and it seemed like everybody in Chicago was making house music. The early
players were joined by a rush of new talent which included the first real vocal
talents of house - Liz Torres, Keith Nunally who worked with Steve Hurley, and
Robert Owens who joined up with Larry Heard to form Fingers Inc, though the duo
had already worked with Harri Dennis on The It's 'Donnie' -and key producers like
Adonis, Mr Lee, K Alexi and a guy who was developing a deep, melodic sound that
relied on big strings and pounding piano - Marshall Jefferson. Marshall worked with a number of people like Harri Dennis and Vince Lawrence for
projects like Jungle Wonz and Virgo, who made the stunning 'RU Hot Enough'. But
it was 'Move Your Body' that became THE house record of 1986, so big that both
Trax and DJ International found a way to release it, and it was no idle boast
when the track was subtitled 'The House Music Anthem', because that's exactly
what it was. Jefferson was to become the undisputed king of house, going on to
make a string of brilliant records with Hercules and On The House and developing
the quintessential deep house sound first with vocalist Curtis McClean and then
with Ce Ce Rogers and Ten City. "I can remember clearing a floor with that
record" laughs Jazzy M. "Though they'd started playing it in Manchester, most of
London was still caught up in that rare groove and hip hop thing. A lot of people
were saying to me 'why are you playing this hi- NRG' and it was hard work but
people were starting to get into it." 'Move Your Body' was undoubtedly the record
that really kicked off house in the UK, first played repeatedly by the
established pirate radio stations in London, which at the time played right
across the Black music spectrum, and then by club DJs like Mike Pickering, Colin
Faver, Eddie Richards, Mark Moore and Noel and Maurice Watson, the latter two
playing at the first club in London to really support house - Delirium. Radio was the key to the explosion in Chicago. Farley Jackmaster Funk had
secured a spot on the adventurous WBMX station, playing after midnight every day,
and it wasn't long before he brought in the Hot Mix 5 which included Mickey
Oliver, Ralphie Rosario, Mario Diaz and Julian Perez, and Steve Hurley, giving
people who couldn't go to the parties the chance to hear the music. Then there
was Lil Louis, who was throwing his own parties. By this time, house was moving
out of the gay scene and on to wider acceptance, though in Chicago at least it
was to remain very much a Black thing. Though a number of Hispanics were on the
house scene, the number of White DJs and producers could be counted on one hand. The labels were still mostly limited to the terrible twins that were to dominate
Chicago house for the next two years Trax and DJ International. Between them
they had nearly all the local talent sewn up and by popular consent they were
just as dodgy as each other, with rumors and stories of rip-offs and generally
dubious activity endlessly circulating. Everybody it seemed, was stealing from
everybody else. One that remains largely untold involved Frankie Knuckles. "This
was the story at the time" recalls Adonis. "Supposedly Frankie sold Jamie
Principle's unreleased tapes to DJ International AND Trax at the same time. Then
Jamie came out with a record called 'Knucklehead' dissing Frankie. After that
Frankie went back to New York." When Rocky Jones at DJ International became convinced by a larger- than-life
character named Lewis Pitzele who was helping put a lot of the deals together at
the time that Europe was the place to focus on, house poured into Britain with
London Records putting the first compilation of early DJ International material
out. As the press bandwagon rolled into action the 86 Chicago House Party
featuring Adonis, Marshall Jefferson, Fingers Inc and Kevin Irving toured the
UK's clubs. Trax took a little longer Adonis: "Trax was meant to be a bullshit label for all the dirty, raggedy records
Larry Sherman didn't give a @!#$ about. You know, labels were always trying to
do radio stuff, but Trax became popular after 'No Way Back' and 'Move Your Body'
and all those tracks." It was DJ International and London who notched up the
first house hits, first with Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk's 'Love Can't Turn Around',
a cover of the old Isaac Hayes song with camp wailer Daryl Pandy on vocals which
reached Number 10 in September 1986, and then a record that spent months
gestating in the clubs before it was finally catapulted to Number One in January
1987 - Jim Silk's 'Jack Your Body'. The Americans were gob smacked. Their
underground club music was going mainstream four thousand miles from its home.
But it was no surprise that Steve Hurley was behind the track, which hit the top
despite only having three words - the title. Even then he was the one with the
commercial touch. It wasn't a terribly original record - the bassline was from
First Choice's 'Let No Man Put Asunder', but it summed up the mood of jack fever.
All of a sudden the word 'Jack', which originally described the form of dancing
people did to house, was everywhere 'Jack The Box', 'Jack The House', 'Jack To
The Sound' 'J-J-J-J-JJack-Jack-Jack-Jack'. It was the stutter sample on the 'J'
that took the word into legend. Vaughan Mason's Raze, who'd quietly been doing
stuff out of Washington DC burst into the clubs and then followed Jim Silk into
the charts with 'Jack The Groove'. And garage? New York simply couldn't match
the energy flowing out of Chicago but there was little doubt that the music was
developing simultaneously. The Jersey garage sound, boosted by Tony Humphries
(who'd also been on the radio since 1981) at Newark's Zanzibar Club, was
beginning to take shape with Blaze but the New York club sound was defined at the
time by Dhar Braxton's 'Jump Back' and Hanson & Davis' 'Hungry For Your Love'
which borrowed heavily from the Latin freestyle sound but echoed the energy of
house. And over in Brooklyn, producers like Tommy Musto working for the
Underworld/Apexton label were developing a different style again, one that like
Chicago seemed to take its roots as much from Eurobeat as from Black music,
though the mood and tempo was strictly New York.
1987
While Chicago stole the thunder in 1986, other cities not only in the United
States but across the world had either been absorbing house or working on their
own thing, biding their time. One record from New York served a warning shot
that the city was gearing up for some serious action - 'Do It Properly' by 2
Puerto Ricans, A Blackman and A Dominican. 'Do It Properly' was essentially a
bootleg of Adonis' 'No Way Back' with loads of samples and a great electronic
keyboard riff squeezed in to it and the first in a long, long line of New York
sample house tracks. Its producers were one Robert Clivilles and David Cole,
helped by another guy called David Morales. After that some kid in Brooklyn
called Todd Terry made a couple of sample tracks with a freestyle groove for
Fourth Floor Records by an act he called Masters At Work. But the sound that was really taking shape in New York and New Jersey was a deep
style of club music based on a heritage that had its roots firmly in r'n'b.
Though there were some superb deep, emotive instrumentats like Jump St. Man's
'B-Cause', the emphasis was on songs, which came with Arnold Jarvis' 'Take Some
Time', Touch's 'Without You', Exit's 'Let's Work It Out' and a record on Movln, a
new label run from a record store in New Jersey's East Orange - Park Ave's 'Don't
Turn Your Love'. Ironically, as the first garage hits began to appear, The
Paradise Garage - Larry Levan had already left - closed, but the vibe carried on
with Blaze, who recorded 'If You Should Need A Friend' and Jomanda, both of whom
teamed up with new New York label Quark. Echoing the need for vocals in house music, deep house began to take hold in
Chicago. Following Marshall Jefferson's lush productions, the record that
defined deep house was the Nightwriters' 'Let The Music Use You', mixed by
Frankie Knuckles and sung by Ricky Dillard, a record that a year later was to
become one of the anthems of the UK's Summer Of Love. And it didn't end there.
Kym Mazelle launched her career with 'Taste My Love' and 'I'm A Lover', while
Ralphie Rosario unleashed the monstrous 'You Used To Hold Me' featuring the
wailing tonsils of Xavier Gold. Then there was Ragtyme's 'I Can't Stay Away',
sung by a guy who sounded a a little like a new Smokey Robinson - Byron Stingily.
Soon after, Ragtyme, who also made an extremely silly innuendo track called 'Mr
Fixit Man', mutated into Ten Clty. But Chicago's excursion into songs wasn't
only characterised by uplifting wailers. There was another side, led by the
weird, melanchoty songs of Fingers Inc and beginning to show itself in other
minimalist productions like MK II's 'Don't Stop The Muslc' and 2 House People's
'Move My Body'. By 1987, though house was no longer a tale of two cities. The
virus was taklng hold elsewhere as clubbers, DJs and producers worldwide became
exited by the new music. It was obvious that Britain, which had already seen a massive boom in club
culture in the mid-eighties as the increasingly racially integrated urban areas
turned to Black music in favour of the indigeonous indie rock music, would
eventually get in on the act. Though acts like Huddersfield's Hotline, The
Beatmasters from London and a handful of others who included DJs Ian B and Eddie
Richards had been trying to figure things out, the first British house track to
really make any noise came from a partnership that included a DJ from
Manchester's Hacienda, one of the very first clubs in Britain to devote whole
nights to house music - Mike Pickering. With its funk bassline and Latin piano
riffs, T-Coy's 'Carino' busted out all over, particularly in London at previously
rap and funk clubs like Raw. But with the open nature of the UK pop charts
compared to Billboard which was an impossibly tough nut to crack for small labels
marketing new music, it was inevitable that the sound would be commercialised.
'Pump Up The Volume' by M/A/R/R/S was a rather lightweight record based on a
house beat with a number of clever (at the time) samples but it worked like crazy
on the dancefloor and it wasn't long before club support propelled it into the
charts, where it held Number 1 for an incredible three weeks. Also in the top
ten at the same time was another record that had broken out of Chicago - the
House Master Boyz' 'House Nation'. The marketability of house - or pophouse - in
the UK became gruesomely apparent with the advent of the 'Jack Mix' series, a
number of hideous stars-on-45 style megamixes of all the house hits. Things were progressing in a much more underground fashion back in the States. A
few guys in particular who'd been noticed hanging out in Chicago and checking the
scene came from a city just a couple of hundred miles away Detroit. One of them,
Juan Atkins, had been making records since the early eighties under the moniker
Cybotron which specialised in spacey electro-funk fired by the Euro rhythms of
Kraftwerk. But progress had been slow and electro had already fused with rap. By
1985 Atkins' sound was beginning to change with records like Model 500's 'No
UFO's', which bore more than a passing resemblance to the new sounds emanating
from their neighbouring city. Two other guys who had been to school with Atkins,
and who shared his passion for European music were also beginning to experiment
with making tracks and heartened by what they heard coming out of Chicago, set to
work Their first tracks, X-Ray's 'Let's Go', produced by Derrick May and Kevin
Saunderson's 'Triangle Of Love' by Kreem weren't classics by any stretch of the
imagination but it didn't tahe them long to hit full power. Kevin came out with
'Force Field' and 'Just Want Another Chance', and Juan pressed on with Model
500's 'Sound Of Stereo' but it was Derrick who really hit the button with Rhythim
Is Rhythm's 'Nude Photo', 'Kaos' and 'The Dance', all of which were immediate
hits on the Chicago scene, and the latter a record that was to be thieved and
sampled again and again for years to come. The Belleville Three, as they became
known after the college they attended, made an amusing trio with Kevin as the
regular guy, Derrick as the fast-talking nutter and Juan as the laid-back
smokehead, but there was more to techno than that. Two other producers who
helped forge the different sound were Eddie Fowlkes and Blake Baxter. It was
faster, more frantic, even more influenced by European electrobeat and severed
the continium with disco and Philadelphia, taking only the space funk basslines
of George Ctinton from Black music. They called it techno. But Chicago was also
beginning to head off into another direction, the most frenetic form of house
yet. It was started by two crazy tracks that Ron Hardy had been pumping at the
Music Box and it was going to be perhaps the most important stage of house so
far. It was acid.
1988
In truth, acid house had already started long before 1988. Amongst the scores of
Chicagoans who were buying equipment and trying to learn how to make tracks was
one DJ Pierre, who'd started out playing Italian imports at roller discos in the
Chicago suburbs, and who had joined Lil Louis for his notorious parties. "Phuture was me and two other guys, Spanky and Herbert J." remembers Pierre. "We
had this Roland 303, which was a bassline machine, and we were trying to figure
out how to use it. When we switched it on, that acid sound was already in it and
we liked the sound of it so we decided to add some drums and make a track with
it. We gave it to Ron Hardy who started playing it straight away. In fact, the
first time he played it, he played it four times in one night! The first time
people were like, 'what the @!#$ is this?' but by the the fourth they loved it.
Then I started to hear that Ron was playing some new thing they were calling 'Ron
Hardy's Acid Trax', and everybody thought it was something he'd made himself.
Eventually we found out that it was our track so we called it 'Acid Trax'. I
think we may have made it as early as 1985, but Ron was playing it for a long
time before it came out." Explanations for the name of 'acid' have been long and varied, but the most
popular, and the one endorsed by a number of people who were there at the time
was that they used to put acid in the water at the Music Box. Pierre though,
stresses that Phuture was always anti- drugs, and cites a track about a cocaine
nightmare, 'Your Only Friend' that was on the same EP as 'Acid Trax'. 'Acid Trax'
came out in 1986 but made little impact outside Chicago, as was the case with
another acid track, Sleazy D's 'I've Lost Control', which slapped a deranged
laugh and some geezer repeating the title over the 303 squelching. 'I've Lost
Control' was made by Adonis and Marshall Jefferson and was certainly the first
acid track to make it to vinyl, though which was created first will possibly
never be known for sure. It wasn't until well into 1987 that the acid sound
began to infiltrate Britain, fuelled by another track that was getting a lot club
play, and which fitted into the sound Bam Bam's 'Give It To Me', and a diversion
of the regular acid track which put vocals into the equation, developed by
Pierre's Phantasy Club with 'Fantasy Girl'. The house scene in Britain had
faltered following the commercialisation of the poppier end of the spectrum, but
towards the end of 1987 the underground was taking off with new LP compilation
series like 'Jack Trax' and the opening in London of seminal clubs like Shoom and
Spectrum and the move of Delirium to Heaven where the main dancefloor became
exclusively house. Delirium's Deep House Convention atLeicester Square's Empire
in February 1988 which featured a number of seminal Chicago artists like Kym
Mazelle, Fingers Inc, Xavier Gold. Marshall Jefferson and Frankie Knuckles was a
depressing event because of the poor turnout. But the people who did go were to
be become the prime movers of London's house explosion. The next week a
warehouse party called Hedonism was rammed and the soundtrack was acid. Acid
house UK style had begun. As acid tracks like Armando's '151' and 'Land Of Confusion', Bam Bam's 'Where's
Your Child' and Adonis' 'The Poke' began to flow out out of Chicago, the scene
grew at a rate of knots with Rip, Love, Future, Contusion and Trip opening in
London, and the legendary Nude in Manchester. DJs suddenly discovered they had a
year's worth of classic house which hitherto they'd been unable to play. When
WBMX in Chicago closed down, signalling the end of radio play for the music in
the city, it was clear that the emphasis had switched to the UK. Acid house
became the biggest youth cult in Britain since punk rock a decade before as
British house records like Bang The Party's 'Release Your Body', Jullan Jonah's
'Jealousy & Lies' (later used as the backbone of Electrlbe 101's 'Talking With
Myself'), Baby Ford's 'Oochy Koochy', A Guy Called Gerald's Voodoo Ray, and
Richie Rich's 'Salsa House' became huge club hits, before the chart UK house
records emerged with S'Express' 'Theme From S'Express', D-Mob's 'We Call It
Acid', which popularised the ridiculous but funny club chant of 'Aciiieeeeed!'
and Jolly Roger's 'Acid Man'. Opinions differ as to the effect on the scene of
the relatively new drug ecstasy, but there was little doubt that the sudden rise
in availabilny of the drug was directly related to the growth of the club scene.
Before the tabloids discovered what was going on with their inevitably lurid
headlines about 'Acid House Parties' and drug barons, it was easy to see people
openly imbibing the drug in any club. Like Chicago radio was to prove crucial to spreading house in Britain. But this
wasn't any trol of legitimate radio. Save for a few token shows, you couldn't
hear Black music or dance music on legal radio, and eventually the demand turned
into supply in the form of numerous pirate stations, mostly in and around London
but also in a few other big cities. Most of them were on and off the air in
months or even weeks, but the more organised stations managed to keep going,
supplying hungry listeners with the music they wanted to hear - reggae, soul,
jazz, hip hop - and house. Steve Jackson's House That Jack Built on Kiss and
Jazzy M's 'Jacking Zone' on LWR pumped out the new music week in, week out. "When LWR was what you call the boom, it was on half a million listeners." says
Jazzy M. And we knew that because the surveys were actually being published in
newspapers The Jacking Zone was getting 40-50 letters a week and I was broke
because all my wages went on new tunes. Once that plane had landed with the
imports, I was getting the new records on the show the same night. It was
unbelievable." 1988 wasn't just acid it was the year that house first really began to diversify.
For a start, there was the 'Balearic' business, an eclectic style of DJing which
at the time encompassed dance mixes of pop artists like Mandy Smith and
quasi-industrial music like Nitzer Ebb's 'Join In The Chant' Championed by Danny
Rampling, Nicky Holloway, Paul Oakenfold and Johnny Walker who'd all been to
Ibiza, Balearic was an integral part of the club scene at the time, but after the
gushing media overkill it all became a little farcical as people attempted to
make Balearic records There was, of course no such thing Then there were the anthems. A year's worth of inspirational Chicago deep house,
which went back to the Nightwriters and took in Joe Smooth's 'Promised Land' and
Sterling Void's 'It's Alright' along the way became some of the biggest club
records of the year, while Marshall Jefferson took the music to new highs with
Ten City's 'Devotion' and Ce Ce Rogers 'Someday'. Marshall was on a roll in 88,
picking up remixes and linking up with Kym Mazelle for 'Useless' It was the deep
house that spawned the first two house LP's, which naturally came out in Britain
first - Fingers Inc's benchmark 'Another Side' and Liz Torres With Master C & J's
excellent 'Can't Get Enough'. Ten City were an important stage in the development of house. With
self-conviction unusually high for the time, they snubbed the Chicago labels
which by that time were losing their artists more quickly than they could sign
them, and headed for Atlantic records in New York where Merlin Bobb promptly
snapped them up. Where nearly all the house that had gone before them was
strictly producer created, Ten City were an act, and they could be marketed as
such. Plus, they returned some of the soul vision to house, a tradition that
went all the way back to the Philly sound it was no coincidence that 'Devotion'
was one of the first records from Chicago to really do well on the East Coast,
which always had much stronger r'n'b roots in its club music. After another huge
club hit with 'Right Back To You', they broached the UK top Ten in January 1989
with 'That's The Way Love Is' Even Detroit was discovering songs. Though the new
techno sound was by now at full tilt with Rhythm Is Rhythm's anthem 'Strings 0f
Life' Model 500's 'Off To Battle' and Reese & Santonio's 'Rock To The Beat', it
was Inner City's 'Big Fun' a techno song with vocals by Chicagoan Paris Grey that
was to propel Kevin Saunderson into the big time. Originally a track recorded for
Virgin's groundbreaking 'Techno! The New Dance Sound Of Detroit' LP, 'Big Fun'
was just too commercial to hold back, and Saunderson suddenly found himself in a
virtually full-time pop duo making videos, follow-up singles and EPs like any
other pop act. Chicago however was still finding new things to do with house, though the next
trend wasn't to be anything like as significant. There had already been raps put
down to house tracks as early as 1985 with 'Music Is The Key' and more recently
with M-Doc's 'It's Percussion', The Beatmasters' 'Rok Da House' and New York's KC
Flight with 'Let's Get Jazzy'. But it was Tyree Cooper (who'd already had a big
club record with 'Acid Over') and rapper Kool Rock Steady who defined the
hip-house style with 'Turn Up The Bass', a galloping track which somehow combined
Kool's rap with the classic Chicago piano sound and Tyree's trademark 909 roll.
It wasn't long before Fast Eddie, also at DJ International, expanded it with 'Yo
Yo Get Funky'. But the biggest new producer of 1988 was someone who didn't come from Chicago at
all. Or Detroit. New York was beginning to flex its muscles, the city that had
always regarded itself the world's capital for dance music wanted some of the
limelight back. But it wasn't an established figure in the New York or New
Jersey dance scene that broke through, it was a kid from Brooklyn who was showing
an incredible alacrity for the new form of sampling that had been co- developing
with house - Todd Terry. First it was those Masters At Work tracks, but after
that Todd hit house in a big way with 'Bango' (at which Kevin Saunderson was
highly miffed, because it heavily sampled one of his records), 'Just Wanna
Dance', Swan Lake's 'In The Name Of Love', Black Riot's 'A Day In The Life' and
'Warlock' and the one that was almost certainly the biggest club record of the
year - Royal House's 'Can You Party!'. Though in New York Todd's sample tracks
were firmly categorized with the Latin freestyle house sound that the Hispanics
were developing, in the UK Todd became the toast of the house scene. In a by now
familiar scenario, 'Can You Party' hit the Top 20 in October on a wave of club
support, closely followed by another track on the new Big Beat label out of New
York, Kraze's 'The Party'. As it became more and more apparent that Chicago was grinding to a halt, New York
was getting it together, with more labels like Cutting (who'd already released
Nitro Deluxe's classic 'Let's Get Brutal' in 1987) and Warlock turning to house
and new labels starting up. One of these was to prove more important than all
the rest - Nu Groove.
1989
By now the UK and its trend-hungry music press had become the local point of the
dance music world. After acid had slumped into fatuousness with the adopted logo
of acid, the smiley, appearing on t- shirts racked up in every high street and
the mainstream press (including the 'qualities') scuttling after every whiff of a
half-arsed drug story, they discovered new beat from Belgium. The trouble was
that save for one or two genuinely good records like A Split Second's 'Flesh',
nearly everyone outside Belgium hated new beat, a sort of sluggish cross between
acid, techno and heavy industrial Euro music and the media hype dissolved into a
number of red faces. Then they discovered garage. 'Garage' as a term had already
long been in use on the house scene to differentiate the smooth, soulful songs
flowing from New York and New Jersey from the more energetic, uplifting deep
house out of Chicago. But the hype on this supposedly new music did allow a lot
of very good acts a chance of exposure that otherwise they wouldn't have had.
The Americans were confused. To most New Yorkers and Jerseyites, garage was what
was played at the Paradise' Garage, which had closed two years earlier. What they
were making was club music or dance music, and house was all that track stuff
from Chicago. But they were happy that someone somewhere was getting off on
their sound. Tony Humphries, who'd been on New York's Kiss FM since 1981 and at
the Zanzibar in New Jersey since 1982, was to become instrumental in exposing the
Jersey sound. Though he was one of more open-minded DJ's In the New York area,
his was the style that married real r'n'b based dance to house. "I really saw house start with the Virgo 1 record, which had that 'Love Is The
Message' skip beat, and I was using that and a lot of other Chicago stuff as
filler between the vocals, so if I was to play Jean Carne I would use the Virgo
drum track before it. Vocals was always very much my thing, and I would say the
people from Chicago we really respected in Jersey were Marshall Jefferson,
Frankie Knuckles and JM Silk. A lot of it was really Philly elements, it was like
Philly living on forever, and that was our flavor. "I became known for breaking
new stuff, and to stay ahead of everyone I had to come up with more and more
demos. I wanted to help all the people around me in Jersey, so around 88-89 I
did a huge showcase with all the acts at Zanzibar first on my birthday and then
at the New Music Seminar. Suddenly everyone was talking about the Jersey sound." Blaze were the forerunners of the new soul vision, followed by their protégés
Phase II, who struck big with the optimism anthem 'Reachin', and Hippie Torrales'
Turntable Orchestra with 'You're Gonna Miss Me'. Then there were the girls -
Vicky Martin with 'Not Gonna Do It' and of course, Adeva, behind whom was the
talented Smack Productions team. ' In And Out 0f My Life' had already been
released by Easy Street a year before, but when Cooltempo signed the Jersey
wailer up on the basis of her cover of Aretha Franklin's 'Respect', mainstream
success was more than on the cards - it was a dead cert. 'Respect' entered the
Top 40 in January and hung around for two months, by which time Chanelle's 'One
Man' and then her own collaboration with Paul Simpson, 'Musical Freedom' had
followed the example. It didn't end there. Jomanda, who shared the billing with
Tony Humphries at a massive event stage in Brixton's Academy were next with 'Make
My Body Rock', and though they were to become successful in the States, their
sound never crossed over in the UK. New York was stepping up the pace in grand fashion and there was a lot more going
on than just the Jersey sound. Following Todd Terry's success, the New York
sample track was breaking out like wildfire, particularly with Frankie Bones,
Tommy Musto and Lenny Dee at Fourth Floor, Breakln' Bones and Nu Groove records.
Nu Groove, built on the foundation of the Burrell twins who'd escaped from an
abortive r'n'b career with Virgin Records, was fast becoming the hippest house
label. Nu Groove had started the year before with records like Bas Noir's 'My
Love Is Magic' and Aphrodisiac's 'Your Love' and by 1989 they were on a roll. Nu
Groove never had a sound - with producers as disparate as the Burrells, Bobby
Konders and Frankie Bones that wasn't conceivable - and they never really had one
big record, but the concept of the label went from strength to strength. Among
their producers was Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez, yet to hook up with Little Louie Vega,
who was moving into house with his Freestyle Orchestra project. Nu Groove's
first competitor was to come in the form of Strictly Rhythm, who opened up in
1989, though their first breakthrough wasn't to come until the following year.
Two other New York producers who were also beginning to make a lot of noise were
Clivilles and Cole with Seduction's 'Seduction' and their excellent deep, dubby
mix of Sandee's 'Notice Me'. Their break into the mainstream came with a mix of
Natalie Cole's 'Pink Cadillac'. Another guy who was also beginning to make a name
for himself as a house remixer was David Morales. But one of the biggest records on the burgeoning UK rave scene was a record that
made very little impact in its native New York - the 2 In A Room LP on Cutting
Records, a follow-up to 2 In A Room's 'Somebody In The House Say Yeah' that
included a clutch of firing sample tracks from Todd Terry, Louie Vega, George
Morel and a few other producers known only on the Latin freestyle scene in New
York. By Summer 89 the acid house scene had grown into the rave scene which was
becoming so big that promoters came up with the idea of putting on huge events in
the countryside outside London - events that could not only hold thousands of
people but which could go on all night. Although the scene was later to
degenerate with an increasingly narrow musical policy, ludicrously numerous DJ
line-ups and suffer from gangster style promoters who saw how much money could be
made, at the time it was incredibly broad. Alongside the regular house movers,
records like Corporation Of One's 'Real Life', Karlya's 'Let Me Love You For
Tonight' and 808 State's 'Pacific' became the open air anthems. Several of those anthems came from a label that had started up in Canada the year
before. Toronto's Big Shot Records was the brainchild of producers Andrew Komis
and Nick Fiorucci, and they were startled when Amy Jackson's 'Let It Loose',
Index's 'Give Me A Sign', Jillian Mendez's 'Get Up' and Dionne's 'Come Get My
Lovin' became huge club records in the UK. "I was dumbfounded about England. To me it was soccer players and the Queen, but
if it wasn't for the dance stores in London and Record Mirror I'd probably be
working in a hardware store." Andrew Komis. Again, the scene was largely fueled
by radio. Though the original pirates had come off the air in an attempt to gain
licenses (Kiss eventually managed it in 1990) and the penalties had been sharply
increased, a new generation of pirates were on the air - Sunrise, Center force,
Fantasy, Dance and countless others. Young, loud and incredibly unprofessional,
they pumped out an endless diet of underground house music round the clock and
shamelessly promoted all the raves. Another set of incredibly successful records came from a country only marginally
more likely than Canada. House records from the Continent were becoming more and
more common, though most of them were sub-standard covers of US and UK records,
and when Italy's Cappella crashed the charts with 'Helyom Halib' it was really
only because it was based on a huge club record from Chicago which had never
managed to crossover - LNR's 'Work It To The Bone'. Then came Starlight with
'Numero Uno' and Black Box with 'Ride On Time', both the work of production team
Groove Groove Melody. 'Ride On Time' was a brilliant concept, taking the vocals
from Loleatta Holloway's 'Love Sensation' and putting them to a sizzling piano
anthem. There was no holding it back. As the record flew up the charts on its
way to becoming the first house Number 1 since 'Jack Your Body', the floodgates
opened. Italo-house was a happy, uplifting lightweight sound nurtured in the
hedonistic clubs of the Adriatic resorts Rimini and Riccioni, and it gatecrashed
everything from the large raves to the hippest clubs. Those that argued that
there was no substance behind it (a lot of the records WERE extremely corny) were
foiled when a more mature sound emerged with Sueno Latino's 'Sueno Latino' and
Soft House Company's 'What You Need.' Despite their initial insistence that
'Ride On Time' wasn't all sampled, Black Box managed to record a very good album,
though they promptly pulled a similar stunt on Martha Wash, who wasn't at all
amused. The Italians would go on to become an integral part of house music, with
one of the most consistent labels, Irma, proving acceptance in New York by
opening up shop there. Even in 1989, when house music had become the property of the world, Chicago
still had a few tricks up its sleeve. Led by people like Steve Poindexter and
Armando, the new underground of the city was returning to its roots with a new,
minimalist style even rougher and rawer than the original drum tracks, a sound
that was to join acid and techno in forming the roots of the hardcore scene.
Another producer who'd led the way with crazy tracks like 'War Games' and 'Video
Clash' was Lil Louis. While his spinning partner DJ Pierre became entangled in a
fruitless contract with Jive Records (a fate that also befell Liz Torres), who'd
opened up in Chicago, Louis' time came in 1989 with a track that slowed down to a
complete halt and had as a vocal only a senes a female love moans - 'French
Kiss'. 'French Kiss' was a huge club record and eventually it climbed to Number 2
in the charts and landed Louis an album deal with Epic in the States and ffrr in
the UK. Though the style had started three years earlier with Jackmaster Dick's
'Sensuous Woman Goes Disco' and Raze's 'Break 4 Love' the previous year, 'French
Kiss' began a sex track phenomenon that was to last a long time. Another group that broke out of Chicago was Da Posse, formed by Hula, K Fingers,
Martell and Maurice. Their early tracks like 'In The Life' were mostly based on
old Rhythm Is Rhythm records, but 'Searchin Hard', a deep house song on Dance
Mania records led them to a deal with Dave Lee's Republic Records, for whom they
eventually recorded an excellent album. Later they formed their own label,
Clubhouse Records. Two other house originals also teamed up in 1989 - Frankie Knuckles and Robert
Owens, who recorded 'Tears' with Japanese keyboardist Satoshi Tomlle. 'Tears'
was a great record but mystifyingly, even in the year of house hits, it failed to
make the charts. Though Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May and Juan Atkins had become
very popular with the majors as remixers, Detroit had become very quiet, and the
only club that supported techno, the Music Institute, had closed down. But a
resurgence was on the horizon with new producers like Carl Craig and a young
protégé of Saunderson who had just made his first record for KMS - Marc Kinchen. Despite the studied apathy of the American music business and repeated attempts
to replace house in Britain with just about anything - Soul II Soul and their
numerous imitators proved more of a hiccup than anything else the 4/4 bass kick
entered the new decade stronger than ever, underground dance scenes developing in
new cities and new countries with every month that passed. Even Spain underwent
its own acid house craze in 89, and threw up the talented Barcelona producer Raul
Orellana, who created a style all of his own by merging flamenco with house. A
comment made in 1988 by Robert Owens on the UK TV documentary 'Club Culture' was
proving truer and truer. "It's not just boom boom boom. They're telling me something here. Something I can
dance to and learn from. I can see house music becoming universal one day. It'll
just take time for people to receive it." written by Phil Cheeseman for DJ magazine
The History of House Music by John DGrotans
MUSIC IS THE KEY...."The beat won't stop with the JM Jock. If he jacks the box and the partyrocks. The clock tick tocks and the place gets hot. So ease your mind and set yourself free. To that mystifying music they call the key".
-Music Is The Key, JM Silk, 1985
House is as new as the microchip and as old as the hills. It first came to widespread attention in the summer of 1986 when a rash of records imported directly from Chicago began to dominate the playlist of Europe's most influential DJs. Within a matter of months, with virtually no support from the national radio networks, Britain's club scene voted with its feet, three house records forced their way into the top ten. Farley "Jackmaster" Funk "Love Can't Turn Around", Raze's "Jack The Groove", and Steve "Silk" Hurley "Jack Your Body", gave the club scene a new buzz-word, jacking, the term used by Chicago dancers to describe the frantic body pace of the House Sound. Whole litany of Jack Attacks beseiged the music scene. Bad Boy Bill's "Jack It All Night Long", Femme Fion's "Jack The House", Chip E's "Time To Jack", and Julian "Jumpin" Perez "Jack Me Till I Scream".
House music takes its name from an old Chicago night club called The Warehouse, where the resident DJ, Frankie Knuckles, mixed old disco classics, new Eurobeat pop and synthesised beats into a frantic high- energy amalgamation of recycled soul. Frankie is more than a DJ, he's an architect of sound, who has taken the art of mixing to new heights. Regulars at the Warehouse remember it as the most atmospheric place in Chicago, the pioneering nerve-center of a thriving dance music scene where old Philly classics by Harold Melvin, Billy Paul and The O'Jays were mixed with upfront disco hits like Martin Circus' "Disco Circus" and imported European pop music by synthesiser groups like Kraftwerk and Telex.
One of the club's regular faces was a mysterious young black teenager who styled himself on the eccentric funk star George Clinton. Calling himself Professor Funk, he would dress to shock, and stay at the Warehouse through the night, until the very last record was back in Frankie's box. Professor Funk is now a recording artist. He appears on stage dressed in the full regalaia of an old world English King singing weird acidic house records like "Work your Body" and "Visions". The Professor believes that the excitement of house music can be traced back to the creativity of The Warehouse. The Professor's memories carry a hidden truth. The decadent beat of Chicago House, a relentless sound designed to take dancers to a new high, it has its origins in the gospel and its future in spaced out simulation(techno).
In the mid 1970's, when disco was still an underground phenomeon, sin and salvation were willfully mixed together to create a sound which somehow managed to be decadent and devout. New York based disco labels, like Prelude, West End, Salsoul, and TK Disco, literally pioneered a form of orgasmic gospel, which merged the sweeping strings of Philadelphia dance music with the tortured vocals of soul singers like Loleatta Holloway. Her most famous releases, "Love Sensation" and "Hit and Run" became working models for modern house records. After an eventful career which began in Atlanta and the southren gospel belt, Loleatta joined Salsoul Records during the height of the metropolitan disco boom, before returning to her hometown of Chicago.
According to Frankie Knuckles, house is not a break with the black music of the past, but an extreme re-invention of the dance music of yesterday. He sees House music with a very clear tradition, a trol of two-way love affair with the city of New York and the sound of disco. If he were to list his favorite records, they would be a reader's guide to disco, including Colonel Abrams "Trapped", Sharon Redd's "Can You Handle It", Fat Lerry's "Act Like You Know", Positive Force "You Got The Funk" Jimmy Bo Horn "Spank", D-Train "You're The One". But most of all he relishes the sound where the church and the dancefloor are thrown together with a willful disregard for religious propriety. Religion weaves its way through the house sound in ways that would confound the disbelievers. Most Chicago DJ's admit a debt to the underground 1970's underground club scene in New York and particulary the original disco-mixer Walter Gibbons, a white DJ who popularised the basic techniques of disco-mixing, then graduated to Salsoul Records where he turned otherwise unremarkable dance records into monumental sculptures of sound.
It was Gibbons who paved the way for the disc-jockey's historical shift from the twin-decks to the production studio. But ironically, at the height of his cult popularity, he drifted away from the decadent heat of disco to become a "Born Again Christian", having created a space which was ultimately filled by subsequent DJ Producers like Jellybean Benitez, Shep Pettibone, Larry Levan, Arthur Baker, Francois Kervorkian, The Latin Rascals, and Farley "Jackmaster" Funk. Most people believed that Walter Gibbons was a fading legend in the early history of disco, then in 1984 he resurfaced, and had a new and immediate impact on the development of Chicago House Sound. Gibbons released an independent 12" record called "Set It Off" which started to create a stir at Paradise Garage, the black gay club in New York, where Larry LeVan presided over the wheels of steel. Within weeks a "Set It Off" craze spread through the club scene, including new versions by C.Sharp, Masquerade, and answer versions like Import Number 1's "Set It Off(Party Rock)". The original record had been "mixed with love by Walter Gibbons" and was released on the Jus Born label, a tongue in cheek reference to Walter's christianity. Gibbons had set the tone again, the "Set It Off" sound was primitive House, haunting, repetitive beats ideal for mixing and extending. It immediately became an underground club anthem, finding a natural home in Chicago, where a whole generation of DJ's including Farley and Frankie Knuckles, rocked the clubs and regularly played on local radion stations.
For major house stars like Frankie Knuckles, the disco consul is a pulpit and the DJ is a high priest. The dancers are a fanatical congreation who will dance until dawn, and in some cases demand that the music goes on in an unbroken surge for over 18 hours. Mixing is a religion.
Old records like First Choice's "Let No Man Put Asunder" and Candido's "Jingo" , Shirley Lites "Heat You Up(Melt You Down)", Eurobeat dance records by Depeche Mode, The Human League, BEF, Telex, and New Order, the speeches of Martin Luther King, and the sound effects of speeding express trains were all used when Frankie Knuckles controlled the decks. And the high priest of house had many desciples. On the southside of Chicago, a young teenager called Tyree Cooper, was intrigued by Frankie's use of the speeches of Martin Luther King. He raided his mother's record collection and discovered a record by local preacher, The Rev. T.L. Barrett Jr. whose choir at the Chicago Church of Universal Awareness were the pride of the city. Tyree began using the record at local House parties and within a few months, sermon mixing, the art of splicing short gospel speeches over frantic dance music, became an established part of the Chicago DJ's art.
It didn't end their. Tyree Cooper joined DJ International Records, ultimately releasing "I Fear The Night", and back home at his mother's church, the choir were beginning to excited about one of their featured vocalists. A gigantic college trained vocalist, Darryl Pandy was boasting about his new record. He had left the choir a few weeks before to sing lead vocals on Farley "Jackmaster" Funk's "Love Can't Turn Around", which against all odds was racing to the number 1 spot on British charts. House had its roots in gospel and its future mapped out. The international success of House came against all known odds. New York and Los Angeles were firmly established as the music capitals of the USA and there was virtually no room for small regional records to make a national impact. According to Keith Nunnally of JM Silk, Chicago turned their limitations into an advantage, turning the poverty of resources into a richness of musical experiment.
Despite technical drawbacks, a whole wave of new independent dance labels sprung up in Chicago. The declaration of independence was led by Rocky Jones DJ International label, a relatively small company which grew out of a DJ Record distribution pool spreading from a small warehouse near Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project, to become one of the trans- national dance scene's most influential labels.
At the 1986 New Music seminar in New York, DJ International roster of artists stole the show, as every major label made frantic bids to buy a piece of the house action. Within a matter of a few days, records by the diminutive House DJ Chip E, the sophisticated gospel singer Shawn Christopher and the outrageous Daryl Pandy were sold round the world. At the height of the bidding, JM Silk signed to RCA records for an undisclosed fortune. The commercial evidence of tracks like "Music Is The Key" and "Shadows of Your Love" proved that House music had the energy and excellence to move from being a regional cult to a modern international success. Within a matter of months every music paper in the world was praying at the feet of Chicago House.
Although the first wave of interest focused on the DJ International label and particulary the unlikely duo of Farley, a legendary Chicago DJ, and his opera trained vocalist Daryl Pandy, it soon became apparent that their hit "Love Can't Turn Around" was only the peak of mid-Western iceberg. Chicago was alive with musicians. Local radio stations like WGCI and WBMX rocked to the music of the "Hot Mix 5", a group of DJ's who mixed whole nights of dance music without uttering a word and clubs like The Power Plant stayed open all-night carrying the torch once held by The Warehouse.
Locked in local competition with DJ International were a hundred other labels. The most important was Trax on North Clark Street, a label which ultimately went on to release some of house music's recognised classics. Marshall Jefferson gave Trax two of its most important records, the hectic 120 BPM "Move Your Body" and the follow up "Ride The Rhythm". His reputation was rivalled by Adonis, who released "No Way Back". The second biggest selling record Trax has ever issued, a record which reportedly sold over 120,000 copies, a staggering number for an independent record which received very little air play.
Behind the visible success story of DJ International, Underground, Trax, were countless smaller labels like Jes Say, Chicago Connectinon, Bright Star, Dance Mania, Sunset, House Records, Hot Mix 5, State Street, and Sound Pak. And behind the stars like Farley and Frankie Knuckles are numerous other musicians, like Full House, Ricky Dillard, Fingers Inc. and Farm Boy.
House music has spread throughout the world. It has spread to Detroit where Transmat Records released Derrick May's Rhythim Is Rhythim record at the Metroplex Studio laying down post-Kraftwerk tracks like "Nude Photo" and "Strings". It has spread to New York, where the respected club producer Arthur Baker has been given a new lease on life, recording unapologetic dance records like Criminal Elements "Put The Needle To The Record" and Jack E. Makossa. It has spread to London where a gang of renegade funk boys called M/A/R/R/S took the British charts by storm, climbing to Number 1 with the brillant collage record "Pump Up The Volume". It has spread into the very heart of pop music, encouraging Phil Fearon, Kissing The Pink, Beatmasters and Mel and Kim to turn the beat around. And it has infilitrated into already dynamic cultures like the Latin and Hispanic dance scene creating new possibilites for Kenny "Jammin'" Jason, Ralphi Rosario, Mario Diaz, Julian "Jumpin" Perez, Mario Reyes and Two Puerto Ricans, A Blackman, and A Dominican. Chicago house has become everyones House. House music is a universal language. Given the undoubted international popularity of the Chicago sound, it would have been easy for the producers of House music to rest on their laurels and continually reproduce more of the same. For a while the city stuck firmly to its identifiable beat - hardcore on the one - but the experimentation which gave birth to House inevitably wanted to change it. By 1987 a new style of House music began to escape from Chicago's recording studios. It was a "deep", highly sophisticated sound, which evoked strange, almost drug-induced images. The second generation House sound probably began with the international success of Phutures's "Acid Tracks" a hugely influential record, which captured the extreme spirit of the House scene's most ardent adherents, the hardcore dancer in Chicago, who variously experimented with LSD, acid psychedelia and new designer drugs like Ectasy.
Frankie Knuckles has been careful not to sensationalise the influence of drugs. "Today there is more psychedlic sound. Acid is probably the most prevelant drug on the scene, but House is no druggier than any other scene".
None of House music's prominent performers have advocated drug abuse nor set out to glorify chemical stimulation, but an increasing number of Chicago records have controversially referred to acid tracking, the estranged synthesiser sound you can hear on several house releases. These Acid Tracks have taken house music into a new phuturism, a modern uptempo psychedelia that London club DJ's call Trance Dance. The roots of Trance Dance are not to be found in the more established traditions of 60's psychedelic rock but ironically in 1970's Europe, through highly synthesised records like Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express" and "Numbers". The trance-dance sound is only beginning to establish on the Chicago Scene but it has already been adopted in British Clubs and will undoubtedly shape the new phuture of house.

 
But beneath the abstract surface of acid-track house records is the same compulsive dance command. Frankie Knuckles is sure of that. "When people hear house rhythms they go freak out. It's an instant dance reaction. If you can't dance to House you're already dead" -Stuart Cosgrove for The History of House Sound of Chicago 12 record set on BCM records, Germany, Out of Print
Inevitably, it was the restless London club scene and the illegal pirate radio stations of urban Britain that seized on the real potential of house. The relatively cheap and do-it-yourself ethics which governed house production meant that young DJ's with inexpensive equipment could make records that were fresher and faster than the more institutionalized major labels. A series of sampled and stolen sounds, released on small scale British independent labels took the popcharts by storm, suprising the record industry and demonstrating that the house sound had a commercial appeal beyond even the wild imagination of the London club scene. In the spring of 1988 a small group of London based DJ's traded their turntables for the recording studios. Tim Simenon, working under the club pseudonym Bomb The Bass and Mark Moore using the band name S-Express had unexpected pop hits with sampled house rhythms. "Beat Dis"
and "The Theme From S-Express" were charateristic of the sound that creative theft and sampling could achieve. DJ's with huge record collections and a catalogue knowledge of breaks, beats, bits and pieces could string together an entirely new record concocted out of barely rememberal records. The masters of the London sampling scene were two unlikely DJ's, Jonathan Moore and Matt Black, who played under the name DJ Coldcut and devastated London's pirate airwaves with imaginative record choices, crazy mixes and a wilful disregard for what made musical sense.
When Coldcut's remix of Eric B and Ra-Kim rap hit "I Know You Got Soul" took the ungrateful New Yorkers to Number 1 in the pop charts in Europe it became obvious that sampling and the spirit of "Pump Up The Volume" was here to stay. The Coldcut rap mix was closely followed by the more house orientated "Doctorin The House" which featured Yazz and The Plastic People, than a cover version of Otis Clay's "The Only Way Is Up", an obscure soul sound which was big on Britain's esoteric northern soul scene. By a strange twist of history, and old Chicago soul singer from the 60's had his career momentarily revitalised by the fallout of the modern Chicago house sound.
By the summer of 1988, the British charts and teh over zealous tabloid press were over-run with acid. The music had clearly touched a raw pop nerve as one by one underground acid-house records stormed into the pop press. But their unexpected commercial success was pursued by controversy and daily press reports that the acid-house scene was a dangerous focus for drug abuse. Each new day brought increased public panic about the abuse of the synthetically compounded Ecstasy drug and by October 1988, acid house and its casual catch phrases "get on one matey", "can you feel it", and "we call it acieeeeed" were in everyday conversation. The controversy reached its head in the autumn of press overkill when "We Call It Acieed" by D. Mob reached number 1 on the British pop charts. Radio stations were reluctant to play the record, BBC's phone in program, "daytime" had a nationwide debate on the acceptability of the song, and in a fit of moral outrage, the Burton's clothes chain withdrew smiley tee-shirts from their stores and refused to participate in the acid epidemic.
Behind the hype and the press hostility the music continued its journey of unparalled progress. If acid house had troubled the mainstream press it had also advanced the creativity of music introducing the remarkable and prodigious talent of Brooklyn's Todd Terry to the forefront of the underground dance music scene.
Todd Terry is a child of house. His whole life spent buried in club culture and experimenting with the extremes of hi-tech music. Under the pseudonym Swan Lake, Martin Luther King's spiritual dream is turned into a dance floor drama, as Royal House's "Can You Party" and The Todd Terry Project "Just wanna Dance" catches the garage spirit of modern house. -Stuart Cosgrove for The History of House Sound of Chicago The Story Continues... BCM Records, Germany Out OF Print
History Of House "Chicago Classics" By Greg Kot
On a summer night in 1979 between games of a White Sox doubleheader at Comiskey Park, Chicago rock deejay Steve Dahl created a fireworks show out of a bunch of Donna Summer and KC and The Sunshine Band albums. Disco Demolition Night started a riot, left the field unplayable and caused the Sox to forfeit a game, but it couldn't kill dance music. Only a few blocks from the ballpark on the city's South and West Sides, a rougher, grittier sound called house was already rising out of disco's ashes.
"I view house as a disco's revenge," says Frankie Knuckles, who was already being called "The Godfather" at Chicago's Warehouse when disco went boom at Comiskey. "I witnessed that Disco Demolition caper and it didn't mean a thing to me or my crowd. It scared the record companies, who stopped signing disco artists and making disco records. So we created our own thing in Chicago to fill the gap.

 
House wasn't so much a new thing as a wild thing. Like disco, house was an all-night religious experience with deejays as ministers who laid down the gospel from on high in a darkened booth armed only with a stack of 12-inch singles, a pair of turntables and a drum machine. But it was rawer, rougher, less glossily produced than most late `70's disco. Its audience was primarily black, gay and Hispanic, and deejays such as Knuckles at the Warehouse, Ron Hardy at the Music Box and Farley "Jackmaster" Funk at the Playground built huge followings with their innovative mixing and sequencing. By the mid-`80's house records were coming out of Chicago in ever greater numbers to feed the demand for fresh grooves.
Many of the early house records were homemade and sounded like it; they consisted of little more than a simple keyboard melody and a ferocious groove that made words superfluous. More often than not, the vocals worked like another rhythmic device, urging dancers to "Jack your body" or "Work it to the bone." Many of the house records that emerged in the mid-`80's out of Chicago might not have passed major-label muster during the disco era, but their raw simplicity worked like an aphrodisiac on the dancefloor. This was the golden age of Chicago house....
Steve "Silk" Hurley, who recorded his 1985 breakthrough, "Music is the Key," as J.M. Silk with vocalist Keith Nunnally, says what made Chicago house different from other dance musics was that its architects were "a bunch of deejays who didn't know what they were doing musically but knew everything about moving a crowd."
"Music is the Key" defined that ethos rhythmically and lyrically: "I am a deejay/And music is my plan/To ease your mind and set you free/From all your days of misery." The follow-up, "Jack Your Body," was even more direct, its title invocation a mantra for the dawn-to-dusk generation in Chicago's clubs.
Like Hurley, Marshall Jefferson was no musician. But the postal worker concocted "Move Your Body," subtitled "The House Music Anthem" and arguably the most sampled record in Chicago house history. The vocal was provided by Curtis McClain, a friend of Jefferson's from the Post Office, but the core of the track was an insistent, idiosyncratic keyboard riff. Jefferson couldn't play keyboards, which made the chord sequence he composed on a sequencer all the more oddly compelling. "I only found out later a normal keyboard player wouldn't play that way," Jefferson says. "You'd have to go against training to do what I did."
Jefferson became an in-demand producer, and his arrangements quickly became more sophisticated, as evidenced by his work with Ten City on "Devotion" and CeCe Rogers on "Someday," records that courted the pop audience while still engaging the hard-core dancefloor crowd.
But in balancing grit with grace, sumptuousness with sizzle, Chicago house records inevitably erred on the lean-and-mean side, as one listen to LNR's salacious "Work It To The Bone" or the minimalist soundscape of Fingers Inc.'s "Mystery of Love" will attest. Also crucial to the Chicago house sound was attitude, something possessed in abundance by such estrogen-driven classics as "Can't Get Enough" by Liz Torres; "You Used to Hold Me," written and coproduced by Ralphi Rosario but wrung of emotion by Xaviera Gold; and especially "Fun With Bad Boys," by punk-scene refugee Screamin' Rachael.
None of these performances quite prepares the listener for the other-wordly, near-hysterical intensity of Daryl Pandy on "Love Can't Turn Around," however. Pandy sounds like he'd sell his home, his first-born and his soul for one more chance with his lover, but in reality what he was selling was the sound of Chicago. His multi-octave wails transformed the Farley Funk-Vince Lawrence-Jesse Saunders anthem into an international siren call, arguably the first shot heard 'round the world from the Chicago house underground, and certainly not the last.
Chicago - Roots Of House Music
In 1977, at the height of Disco, Frankie Knuckles was enticed to leave his successful DJ work in New York to help open a new club in Chicago. Chicago was not a dance music city in the late 1970's and was known primarily for its world-class blues. Many clubs still were relying on jukeboxes for music and rarely used live DJs. Into this void stepped Frankie Knuckles to help begin the House movement which would revolutionize dance music in the mid 1980's. The origin of the name House to describe the music has often been disputed, but it seems the most reliable explanation is a shortening of the name of Knuckles' club the Warehouse. According to Frankie, much of the music he played in the late 1970's at the Warehouse was standard East Coast disco, Philly soul, and Salsoul. By 1981 he had begun to reconstruct and remix records live with additional percussion effects. The House sound was beginning.
The evolution of House music can not (and should not) be attributed solely to Frankie Knuckles. There were a number of DJs and other music industry figures who played key roles and helped to cross-pollinate the sound that was developing. In 1981, a group of DJs formed the Hot Mix 5 to give their music a radio outlet on Chicago's legendary WBMX-FM. Among the DJs ere Farley Keith, better known as Farley "Jackmaster" Funk and Ralphie Rosario, who remains a top dance music performer and producer today. Farley would later become resident DJ at the Playground club, a crosstown rival of Frankie Knuckles' Warehouse.
House music would introduce a powerful beat to mainstream dance music. The beat became strong and hard. Often early house music was as much about rhythm as it was about any vocals or other aspects of the recording. House also became a showcase for the talents of DJs and remixers. Elements of wide ranging recordings from found voices to classic soul would weave in and out to help work the dancefloor crowd into a frenzy.
By 1983 Jesse Saunders was emerging as a key figure in the development of House music in Chicago by releasing some of the first commercial recordings. Jesse had begun DJing in Chicago after returning from the University of Southern California in 1981. He eventually became resident DJ at the Playground, one of the key large clubs for early House. After having one of his favorite mixes stolen, he decided to recreate and rerecord it himself with his own synthesizers and drum machine. The result was the single Fantasy, released in 1983. Later in the year he released On and On on his own Jes-Say Records label. It is considered by many to be the first commercially released House recording.
Among the sounds used by Jesse Saunders in his groundbreaking recording were the bass line from Space Invaders, the "toot toot hey beep beep" loop from Donna Summer's Bad Girls, and the horn chart from Funkytown. After Jesse Saunders' seminal recordings, House music began to develop quickly. Larry Sherman soon opened Chicago's legendary Trax Records label. Ron Hardy at the Powerplant, Frankie Knuckles at the Warehouse, and Farley Keith at the Playhouse reigned supreme among DJs spinning new records for their devoted crowds. Locally produced House ecordings began to be released at a furious pace in Chicago as producers and entrepreneurs battled for the city's House crown.
In 1986, Farley "Jackmaster" Funk released Love Can't Turn Around, the first House record to have a major chart impact. Later Steve "Silk" Hurley had the first House #1 with Jack Your Body. By the end of the 1980's House music had become one of the key sounds in dance music around the world.
...and in Detroit - The beginning of Techno
In 1981, Juan Atkins and a college friend, Rick Davis (also known as 3070), released a single in their home city of Detroit as Cybotron. The song was called Alleys of Your Mind. The release was self-financed, but helped begin drawing a blueprint for one genre that would permanently alter the sound of dance music, Techno. Although the roots of Techno lie in electronic music of the 1970's, it's influence is only now, in the late 1990's, coming into full blossom.
Disco was never as popular in Detroit as other major dance music markets such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Instead, George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic empire enthralled audiences with their funk rhythms and concentration on the spaces between the beats as much as the beats themselves. Juan Atkins, and other key figures in the early development of Techno, was infatuated with funk, but he also found the imported electronic music of Kraftwerk intriguing. Kraftwerk's futuristic but highly melodic music both contrasted and blended with George Clinton's sci-fi fables of the P-Funk nation and their funky mothership. Kraftwerk's Pocket Calculator brought them to American dancefloors at the same time as the Techno pioneers were experimenting to take their sound the next step beyond.
Juan Atkins has claimed that a Detroit DJ known as the Electrifyin' Mojo was a major influence on Detroit music and Juan's particular interests. The Mojo played a lot of British and German import music including Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, and Gary Numan. Prior to recording, Juan had hooked up with his friend Derrick May doing live DJ sets and mixing. On the strength of their local reputation they convinced Mojo to let them provide mixes for his shows. as early as 1981. Juan Atkins' recordings with Rick Davis continued beyond Alleys of Your Mind. They released Cosmic Cars in 1982 and an album Enter on San Francisco's Fantasy label. By 1985 musical differences caused Juan to strike out on his own toward even greater experiementation.
Derrick May is often given credit as one of the prime technological architects of Techno. Always experimenting, May continues to push the music he once described as "George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company" into new, unexplored territory. Unlike most dance music producers and artists, he begins with ambient sounds and strings, then adds melody and last are drums. Although he participated early on with Juan Atkins in developing the sound of Techno, he did not begin releasing his own recordings until toward the end of the 1980's. Today his Transmat Records label has a reputation as one of the top independent Techno labels in the world.
Kevin Saunderson helped push Techno into world consciousness with the Detroit group Inner City. Their first hit Big Fun made the dance charts in late 1988 after Techno had been growing and expanding for 7 years in Detroit. Saunderson believes much of his music is an extension of what British performers such as Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, and Heaven 17 began in the early 1980's but never completed. To Kevin Saunderson, Techno is taking the next logical steps forward.
In the late 1990's, Techno continues to evolve and expand from spacy ambient textures to hyperspeed driving drum 'n bass. Techno made major commercial advances as Madonna worked with producer William Orbit to incorporate a wide variety of textures and rhythms from Techno on her Ray of Light album.
The Words Of Jack
In the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove. And from this groove came the grooves of all grooves. And while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldy declared, "Let there be HOUSE!" and house music was born.
"I am, you see, I AM THE CREATOR!, and this is my house." "And, in my house there is ONLY house music." "But, I am not so selfish because once you enter my house it then becomes OUR house, and OUR house music."
And, you see, no one man owns house, because house music is a universal language, spoken and understood by all. You see, house is a feeling that no one can understand really unless you're deep into the vibe of house.
House is an uncontrolable desire to jack your body. And, as I told you before, this is our house and our house music. And in every house, you understand, there is a keeper. And in this house, the keeper is Jack.
Now some of you who might wonder, who is Jack and what is it that Jack does?
Jack is the one who gives you the power to jack your body. Jack is the one who gives you the power to do the snake. Jack is the one who gives you the key to the wiggly worm. Jack is the one who learns you how to walk your body. Jack is the one that can bring nations and nations of all Jackers together under one house.
You may be black, you may be white, you may be Jew or Gentile. It don't make a difference in OUR House. And this is fresh.

Mr.Fingers "Can You Feel It" accapella on Trax records 12"

1972 - Sanctuary sluit, Loft (david Mancuso)
1974 - Donna Summer 'Love to love you baby'
1977 - Studio 54, paradise garage (larry levan), warehouse (Frankie Knuckels)
Kraftwerk 'trans europe express', Donna Summer 'I feel love'
DISCO
1979- 'Disco Sucks'
1980- studio 54 sluit
1981 - Chicago WBMX Hotmix5
HOUSE
1983 - Music Box (Ron Hardy), Jesse Saunders 'on and on'
TECHNO
1985 - Juan Atkins 'no ufos'
GARAGE
1987 - Paradise Garage sluit, 'jack your body' no1 in Engeland
Phuture 'Acid trax', roXY in Amsterdam, Shoom in Londen
ACID
1988 - 'Summer of love' in Londen en Amsterdam, Spectrum, Loodsfeesten,
Royal House 'can you party?'
1989 - 1e Loveparade, raves in en rond Londen en Amsterdam
Madchester, parkzicht (Rotterdam), A-men 'pay the piper'
1990 - Joey Beltram 'energy flash', Bleep, Ambient, Italo house
1991 - Hardcore, trance (oldschool)
1992 - techno
1994 – Jungle/gabber
1995 - happy hardcore
1996 - Big Beat/Chemical Beats
1997 - speedgarage
1998 - club/eurotrance, Gatecrasher
1999 - 2step,"lounge"
2000 - progressive

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"Ik sta op de foto met Saartje!"
Wie kan dat nou zeggen? Juist, Swiebertje, Bromsnor en Jack Undercover!

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Undercover en Saartje; "Wij zijn twee vriendjes, jij en ik!"

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