Avant-Funk - A Certain Ratio and 23 Skidoo

A CERTAIN RATIO

The Graveyard and the Ballroom

To Each...

Sextet

The Old and The New

reviewed for The Wire, circa 1995

A CERTAIN RATIO were one of those bands who seem monstrously significant at the time, but then fade away, leaving little in the way of legacy and nary a trace in the folk-memory. There was a lot of it about in the post-punk 'anti-rockist' era (see also The Pop Group, Gang Of Four, Magazine). All this makes it both touching and puzzling that Creation, that most rockist of labels, was sufficiently fond of ACR to reissue their Factory oeuvre.

Perhaps one indicator of the sheer speed with which ACR's moment was eclipsed (after New Pop, their angst-funk seemed like no fun) is the fact that the only thing of theirs I ever acquired is 1979's "The Graveyard and The Ballroom". Originally a cassette-only release in a nifty translucent green plastic pouch, it's still the most appealing document of ACR's peculiar project: draining all the joy, sexuality and

ecstatic release out of black dance pop, transforming funk into a grimly addictive rhythmic metaphor for control and obsession. Factory's house producer Martin Hannett lent his deathly-dry touch to the 'Graveyard' tracks, his trademark vaulted sound turning the discotheque into a mausoleum. It's perfect for ACR's skeletal garage funk (on the sick-joke 'Crippled Child' they actually sound like a sub-'Nuggets' '60s punk band). Musically primitivist, maybe, but ACR were far from ignorant: "Do The Du" refers to Isidore Ducasse, a.k.a. Lautreamont, author of the awesome proto-surrealist prose-poem "Maldoror".

The live "Ballroom" side sounds more full-bodied and texturally brimming (despite the lo-fi, virtually hand-held sound quality, which makes a mockery of the CD reissue format). On "The Fox", "Oceans" and "The Choir", the miasma of echoed falsetto, background whispers and sub-Miles trumpet-in-fog is nicely mesmeric, kinda like Joy Division getting on the good foot. (Mid-song Simon Topping piss-takes Ian Curtis with a burst of "I was waiting for a guy to come and take me by the hand").

"Ballroom" was probably as good as ACR got. Perhaps if they'd hooked up with Grace Jones to cover Talking Heads' "Houses In Motion", as was once mooted, they'd have injected some soul or at least personality into their ghost-funk. As it is, the official studio debut "To Each..." (1981) is as obtuse and intransitive as its title. Hannett shrouds every instrument with gauzy condensation, so that only the superior rhythm section (dig Donald Johnson's restless hi-hat and crisp snare-cracks!) keeps the fog of avant-funk anemia moving. "Sextet" (1981) is marginally less muffled-sounding, but this is still disco for dead souls. Bustling drum and bass grooves are wreathed in wisps of Martha Tilson's affectless vocal alienation, while the horns sound winded and wan, like an existentialist Beggar & Co. Still "Knife Slits Water" is dankly compelling, urgent slap-bass slicing through aqueous ambience.

"The Old and The New", a 1985 compilation that swept up some 12 inch semi-precious gems, is probably your second-best bet after "Graveyard". The cold-fever fatback shuffle and lunar gyrations of "Flight", with its distant jazz-funk whistles (ghosts of Caister weekenders?) still sounds fab, as does the dessicated cover of "Shack Up". And "Thin Boys", a Hannett-produced early track,is a dirge-in-a-catacomb worthy of US hardcore band Flipper, with comically grave lines like "clinging to each other like magnetised leeches". Tres 1979.

By the 1983 Simon Topping had departed (to study Latin percussion in New York, if memory serves), resurfacing at decade's end as a mainstay of house group T-Coy and the De-Construction label, just at the point when avant-funk ideas were filtering into popular consciousness via acid house. With Donald Johnson at the helm, ACR honed their jazz-funk chops and turned into Level 42.

23 SKIDOO

Seven Songs

(Ronin)

Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

Shame there's no good genre term sufficiently evocative and open-ended for the kind of music 23 Skidoo made. "Avant-funk" is too ugly, "death disco"  is melodramatic and PiL-specific, "industrial"'s been tarnished by its latterday exponents.  Whatever.  Skidoo were prime explorers of a sonic terrain that opened up in punk's aftermath, when people were looking for a forward path to take them as far from the reek of rock's corpse as possible. Funk, it was decided, was the new music of danger. Based on a quite small range of instances---the madness latent in James Brown's most frenzied polyrhythms, the voodoo grooves of  Tago Mago and Davis's On The Corner, Sly Stone's darker moments, Fela Kuti (Africa's JB), Last Poets--the idea of funk as a sinister energy emerged: rhythm as enslavement, as addiction, as possession. Mix in ideas borrowed from vanguard sci-fi authors Ballard & Burrough (sounds like a confectioners!) and paranoid vibes from Seventies auteur movies like Pakula's Klute and Coppolla's The Conversation, and voila, you've got the future. 

Proteges of Genesis P. Orridge (who let them rehearse at his Death Factory space), 23 Skidoo bridged avant-funk's first-wave (Pop Group, Cabs, A Certain Ratio) and lesser second-wave (Hula, Chakk, Shriekback, 400 Blows). Their records have been out-of-print for years, but Skidoo have enjoyed a spectral presence in dance culture: the bassline to their  single "Coup" was copied note-for-note by The Chemicals on "Block Rockin' Beats"; early darkside jungle circa 1993 was often bizarrely Skidoo-like, despite the absence of any direct lineage; the group's ethnological forgeries and tape-looped exotica pre-echoed the world music samplings of your Loop Gurus.

This sort of talk--precursors, legacies, inheritors, ahead-of-their-time, etc--is pretty academic, though: the real question is, why listen now? Because 1981's Seven Songs especially still sounds bloodcurdlingly intense. A malevolent tumble of hand-percussion, guitar feedback, and gutteral chants, opener "Kundalini" is as much Birthday Party as Gap Band, while the seething slap-bass and brittle-nerved rhythm guitar of "Vegas El Bandito" is offset by a lugubrious wail of lost-in-endless-fog trumpet. The track immediately cuts into "Mary's Operation", dropping everything but the dank, ailing Miles-like trumpet,  multi-tracked and mingled with tape-loop drones. This resulting gloomscape of wilted, billowing sound in turn devolves into  "Lockgroove", a roiling cosmic cistern. "New Testament" is dying machinery, a drum track massively slowed down and elongated, its rapid percussive events blossoming into pendulous cymbal-smashes and smeared snares. "IY" showcases Skidoo's strength (percussion) and  weakness (vocals), but "Porno Bass" is just ill: booming bassdrones reverberate in a cavernous murk, while Hitler fan Unity Mitford, plucked from some radio interview, rails against  pop music for displacing "manly" activities like athletics, sexually hyperstimulating da youth, and generally being "the sign of a degenerating race". When the rancid old nutcase opines that young people's  "ears become degraded by wrong style and senseless reiteration", Skidoo mischievously double-loop the word "reiteration". 

Seven Songs's closer "Quiet Pillage" references exotica king Martin Denny (whose Polynesian-flavored  "Quiet Village" was a massive Fifties hit) but evokes an Apocalypse Now: The Day After vibe of humid disquiet. The track's plinky metallic chimes look ahead to  1984's Urban Gamelan,  made after an expedition to Indonesia.  "GIFU" is basically an alternate mix of "Coup", Skidoo's  most straightforwardly funky single, with a Viet-Cong war-cry "G.I., fuck you" added for anti-imperialist edge, but most of the album is precisely what the title promises: gamelan-influenced drumstrumentals, all tuned percussion, hand-cymbals, and gongs. bals, gongs, and woodblocks. Well-produced compared with the hastily executed debut, Urban Gamelan often teeters on the thin line between minimal and underwritten. Its gently ominous atmosphere--space age bachelor padded cell music--grows on you, but it lacks the turbulence and sheer de-civilising ferocity of Seven Songs.

                                                                                                                               

J Dilla

THE CULT OF DILLA
June 16th 2009, The Guardian


by Simon Reynolds

Record stores are dying in my neighbourhood, the East Village of New York. The only ones that are hanging in there, even prospering, belong to a particular type:  boutiques that offer a tidied-up version of the crate-digging experience, without the dust and the graft, the knees-bent flicking through musty cardboard boxes in roach-infested basements.  Smart-looking and well-organised, these stores have nice-looking racks made of unvarnished wood, while their wares--funk and soul, bebop and fusion, soundtracks and library music--tend to be selective and pricey.  As well as selling source vinyl for the  breaks and samples prized by deejays and producers, these stores also stock vintage rap 12 inches and current underground hip hop (always on vinyl, of course). Up by the counter, they'll have copies of Wax Poetics on sale.

Several years ago I was in one of these local shops, just about to clap headphones on my head and sift through an armful of vinyl, when some wondrous music streamed out of the store's sound system. All rippling ribbons of synth and quiet storm diva murmuring and gasps, it was the most swooningly cosmic thing I'd heard in a small eternity. As I headed down the aisle to the back of the store where the deejay lurked, the thought popped into my head: "p'raps this is Dilla?" 

I don't know why, really, since I only had a vague idea of who he was, having read about his recent death and gleaned that he was this big deal cult producer.  J Dilla, a/k/a Jaydee, a/k/a James Dewitt Yancey, is someone I had "slept on" (to use the American expression).   To be honest, I avoid that whole backpacker rap/Premier-is-God/Wax Poetics area.  (In fact I only go to these crate-digger boutiques because they sometimes have Sixties and Seventies rock and weird avant-garde stuff). I'm one of those who believe that the sector that kept rap vital these last dozen years wasn't the underground but that cusp zone between "the streets" and commercial mainstream: Cash Money, Ruff Ryders, Ludacris, Lil Jon. Mostly Dirty South, in other words: hip hop that isn't encumbered by crippling reverence towards its old skool past. 

Still, sometimes as a critic you just absorb a sense of the musical landscape through osmosis and sure enough when I asked the deejay what record he was playing, he reluctantly (the attitude, typical for this kind of store, seemed to be "if you need to ask, you're not someone who needs to know") showed me the instrumentals version of Dilla's posthumous album The Shining.

In the next week I got hold of as much Dilla as I could:  stuff he'd done with his group Slum Village and in collaboration with Madlib, solo records like Donuts, Ruff Draft, Welcome To Detroit, and, naturally The Shining (where I discovered that the track that blew my mind in the store was called "Won't Do"). 

As a body of work, though, it seemed… variable. For every "Won't Do" or similar gem like the halcyon summer-soul-breeze "So Far To Go"  (also on The Shining) there'd be a bunch of backpacker-friendly beats with a languid MC rapping on top.  Still cultists love fragmentary, scattered bodies of work, they enjoy nothing more than chasing down obscure remixes and impossible-to-find mixtapes.  

And sure enough, in the ensuing years, the cult of Dilla has grown ever bigger. An entire wave of music has come through influenced by his trademark style, the most prominent exponents being Flying Lotus, a/k/a Californian experimental hip hop producer Steven Ellison, who recorded the Dilla homage "Fall In Love",  and SA-RA Creative Partners, who collaborated with Dilla on the track "Thrilla" and whose splendid new album Nuclear Evolution: The Age of Love is out soon.  

There's also a burgeoning micro-industry of posthumous product.  Rapster/!K7 have issued two Dillanthology compilations of his productions and remixes for other artists, the second of which is out this month. As is the all-new album Jay Stay Paid, a selection of basement tapes sequenced and spruced up by his mother Maureen Yancey with help from Dilla's hero Pete Rock (like Premier, one of those  cult producers that underground rap types drool over).  As far as I can tell, Jay Stay Paid is the first time that a hip hop beat-maker has gotten the kind of life-after-death treatment afforded superstar rappers like Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. You even get people wearing T-shirts that say "J Dilla Changed My Life".

So what made Dilla special?  If you could break his style down into three main components, they'd be his way with a vocal sample, his way with a beat, and his way with synths.  

As an example of the first, let's look at a really old track that's on the first volume of Dillanthology:  "The Light" by Common. I loved this when it came out in 2000 but I'd never realized that Dilla produced it until I got Dillanthology.  "The Light" is pretty much the only Common tune I've ever cared for and such was my antipathy to the rapper that for a long while I considered the track a kind of sample-delivery machine: you wait patiently through the verses for the gorgeous, glistening chorus, which is derived from "Open Your Eyes" by Bobby Caldwell, a white-but-sounds-black singer who hit big in early Eighties America with a similar "rock 'n' soul" sound to Hall & Oates. 

If you compare the original song (and do check out Caldwell's hat while you're about it) with "The Light" you can clearly see  Dilla's artistry: he's taken an already lovely, if slightly schmaltzy song and created another song out of it.  "Open Your Eyes" is a guy telling a woman to stop pining for her lost lover, because what she needs is right here in front of her. Combining different bits of the chorus into a new chorus, Dilla extracts from the original song a more mystical statement about L.O.V.E. that fits Common's lyric (which I grew to find, um, touching) like a glove.   The most extraordinary, steal-your-breath part of "The Light" comes at the end where Dilla takes vocal fragments from various points in the song--a line here, a curl of grace notes there-- and weaves them into what sounds like a stretch of spontaneous soul-singer extemporizing. It's as though Caldwell is right there in the studio with Dilla and Common, scatting over the beat.

Talking of beats: Dilla's signature, widely forged at the moment, is what tech-heads call unquantized drums.  Quantization is a procedure that makes rhythms perfectly regular, grooves superhumanly tight.  The gist of what Dilla did (and I invite comments box experts to fill in the gaps in excruciating technical detail) is to avoid quantizing and go for a looser, human feel, fitful and fallible, sometimes pushing "off-beat" to the edge of plain wrong.  Hip hop headz talk of Dilla as the catalyst for "the return of the boom-bap"  ,  a phrase originally from  KRS-One's  1993 album "Return of the Boom Bap" . 

Sometimes rendered boom-boom-bap, it's a phonetic evocation of hip hop's classic drum pattern.  The booms are the kicks, the bap is the snare, and the combination is that loping midtempo groove that tugs at your neck and your head, not so much at your hips or your feet.  As it has developed in underground rap circles these past fifteen years, boom-bap has come to refer to hip hop for nodders and smokers.  To backpackers it's the very pulse of life itself, but to these ears, boom-bap strikes me as being as capable of being blandly formulaic as any other kind of beat.  Dilla did his fair share of perfunctorily functional grooves but at his most creative he deconstructed the rhythm, placing the booms and baps, hi hats and claps, in an off relationship to each other, clustered too close or coming in too late, but always retaining a ghostly relationship to hip hop feel.

And finally the synths, which burble and twitter through a lot of Dilla tracks (see "On Stilts,"  "Spacecowboy vs. Bobble Head" and "Dilla Bot Vs. The Hybrid,"  highlights of Jay Stay Paid) , although it's often hard to tell if they are sampled off some obscure record or played on a vintage analog keyboard.  Even more than the cut-up "vocal science" and the stumbling beats, this is one of the most widely imitated aspects of Dilla's style, especially within that amorphous genre-not-genre known as Wonky.  A musician friend of mine, Matthew Ingram (check out his debut album as Woebot ) tells me this has a lot to do with the rise of "soft synths," which have been embraced by producers in lots of different genres.  Simplifying the technicalities, what this means is that producers can have the virtual equivalent of an analogue synthesizer inside their digital audio workstations.  This enables them to simulate the hands-on fun of knob-twiddling and moving sliders that you get with an antique synthesiser and which generates all those supercool retro-futurist wibbles and wooshes.  "Soft synths aren’t always emulations of analogue synths," says Ingram. "But analog synth emulators are increasingly popular at the moment."  And they're one reason Dilla is such a spectral (omni)presence across the left-field music landscape of the late Noughties.

disco heritage

BODY & SOUL
'Sound of the City' column, Village Voice, June 1st, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

During VH1's rock history series, Tom Petty (historically speaking, a louse on Dylan's scrotum) declares: "Our goal in the Seventies was to destroy disco". VH1 clearly endorse Petty's view of disco as "a terrible menace to music." Blissfully unaware that their culture is still being written out of history, a thousand mad-for-it dancers gather every Sunday evening for Body & Soul at Vinyl, and celebrate disco as a living musical tradition. 

Like many in the crowd, resident DJs Francois Kevorkian and Danny Krivit are middle-aged veterans of Manhattan's 1970s underground disco scene; B&S is modelled on the legendary Paradise Garage, right down to the alcohol-free juice bar and fabulously crisp sound system. The crowd--a utopian mix of black and white, male and female, straight and gay, drugged and undrugged, shirted and shirtless--clearly don't recognize the rockist version of disco as the death of community and meaning. Soul classics by Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield are dropped next to Nineties deep house anthems, as if they're all part of the same sonic/spiritual continuum. Krivit sometimes cuts out the testifying choruses so the audience can participate, call-and-response style. 

This can get a bit too Pentecostal, though, and I prefer it when vocal-free house tracks are meshed into a redemptive flow of ambient gospel. The combination of the club's sweat-stippled humidity and the spongy, succulent sound creates an intimate pressure, amniotic and baptismal. Often, I'm reminded of Talking Heads at their Steve-Reich-meets-King-Sunny-Ade peak--like Remain In Light, the music's built from onionskin layers of melodic-percussive pulses. Afro-funk is actually a major fad in house at the moment, with Masters At Work reworking Fela Kuti tunes. 

If anything, B& S set a tad too much store in vocal accomplishment and live instrumention (chickenscratch guitar, horns, etc), not enough on disco's plastique fantastique side. To my rave-glazed ears, the most exciting stuff at B&S is what house heads call "tracky" as opposed to "songful"--instrumental rhythm tracks that are dub-spacious and FX-addled. But even spinning a hoary slice of faux-disco like the Stones's "Miss You", Kevorkian will use the mixer's EQ switches to cut out whole frequency bands, creating violently lurching, staccato dynamics. It's like a latent house track is fighting its way out of the original song, Alien-style. The phuture manifesting itself through the past's flesh---this is how disco/house culture evolves, honoring its ancestors even as it bastardizes the legacy.


Disco Double Take - New York Parties Like It’s 1975

Village Voice, July 11 - 17, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

Bang the Party prides itself on being "the last real underground house party in New York." Held upstairs in Frank's Lounge, a Fort Greene, Brooklyn, bar, it's an unpretentious and intimate affair. The lighting and decor are minimal, and there's free food laid out in a back room. The crowd, mostly black and Hispanic, includes many people who look old enough to have been clubbing for two decades or longer. Likewise the music: The beats kick with a contemporary sharpness, but most of the tracks played by resident DJ E-Man sound like they could have been made in the mid '70s, exuding a played-not-programmed feel and brimming with warm textures that feel "organic" rather than computerized. Most importantly, that crucial intangible "vibe"—the thing that makes or breaks a party—is fully present. When a fuse blows, temporarily cutting the sound dead, the audience claps and hollers to maintain the absent beat, with one patron rhythmically chanting, "We don't need no music!"

Bang is one of a number of New York parties directly modeled on the Loft, a legendary dance party of the early '70s hosted by David Mancuso in his own apartment. Fascinated by the futuristic, dance culture feels an equally potent tug toward the past: It's obsessed with roots, origins, and all things "old school." In the last few years, interest in this pre-disco era of New York nightlife—during which the Loft and similar clubs like the Sanctuary and the Gallery thrived—has grown dramatically. Partly this is a response to a sense of malaise in the city's contemporary dance culture, which some identify with slick corporate superclubs like the recently closed Twilo and others attribute to the Giuliani-sponsored crackdown on clubland. Reinvoking the "original principles" of the New York dance underground, nights like Body & Soul, Together in Spirit, Journey, and Soul-Sa appeal both to disenchanted veterans of the original scene and to neophytes who feel the romance of a lost golden age they never actually lived through. With clubbing tourists coming from all over the world to experience "the real thing" as a sort of time-travel simulacrum, New York's '70s-style dance underground has become a veritable heritage industry similar to jazz in New Orleans.

Stoking the interest in this period during the past year were a spate of books (ranging from the disco memoir Keep on Dancin' by Mel Cheren, financial backer of the Paradise Garage, to histories like Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's Last Night a DJ Saved My Life) and CD compilations (like the ongoing series David Mancuso Presents the Loft and Disco Not Disco, a collection of the "mutant disco" played by the late Larry Levan at the Garage). There's even a documentary movie, Maestro, due out this fall and featuring interviews with all the major players of the era. "We have rare footage of the Loft, the Gallery, Paradise Garage—stuff that no one's ever seen," says producer-director Josell Ramos. Excerpts will be previewed at Body & Soul's annual July 22 birthday bash for Levan, which is hosted by the Maestro team this year.

Some of the most diligent curators of this era of New York club culture are actually foreigners. The first academic treatise on this subject, You Better Work!, is by a German, Kai Fikentscher. And it took a London label, Nuphonic, to honor David Mancuso's legacy by organizing the Loft compilations. Right now, Nuphonic is about to issue a trilogy of anthologies that pull together the hard-to-find output of avant-disco auteur Arthur Russell, creator of quirky "Loft classics" like Dinosaur L's "#5 (Go Bang)" and Loose Joints' "Is It All Over My Face?" The Russell project is a labor of love that has taken Nuphonic founder Dave Hill six years to complete. Nuphonic is also home to contemporary U.K. outfits like Faze Action and Idjut Boys, whose music is steeped in the '70s New York sound. Listen to Faze Action's debut Plans & Designs, and you imagine the brothers Simon and Robin Lee fanatically studying the orchestral arrangements on old Salsoul 12-inches, like the Stones once did with Muddy Waters records.

What exactly is the allure of this period? "It's that whole mythic aura thing," says Hill. "None of these people went to the Loft in the '70s or the Garage in the '80s, so the spell can't be broken.

It's like some mad idyllic party that they can't ever have attended. Who knows if these clubs were really that great, but they certainly yielded some fascinating stories, and some fantastic records."

Pretty much anybody who's anybody in the New York house scene, from David Morales to Danny Tenaglia, was a "Loft baby" (or claims they were). Although the Sanctuary's Francis Grosso—who died this year—invented DJ'ing in the modern sense (long sets "beat-matched" to sustain a nonstop groove), it was Mancuso who pioneered the we-are-family vibe central to house culture and the idea of the club as total experience, with every aspect—audiophile sound system, lights, decor, free food—micromanaged for your pleasure.

"I started doing the Loft regularly in 1970, as an invitation-only rent party at my Soho apartment," says the bearded and big-bellied Mancuso between mouthfuls of Italian sausage at his favorite East Village restaurant. A few blocks away is his 6th Street office, where Mancuso keeps the remnants of the Loft's legendary sound system. Keen to demonstrate the importance of what he calls "Class A audio," the 56-year-old DJ treats me to a private performance.

Tracks like Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares for Me" shimmer with lustrous detail—the crisp, clear sound gives me goose bumps. Suddenly, it's easy to understand all those stories of people being brought to tears by Mancuso's DJ'ing.

One record Mancuso plays—Van Morrison's 1968 classic Astral Weeks—reveals the crucial, underacknowledged links between the proto-disco scene and the rock counterculture. Today, disco is often celebrated for its camp and kitschy plasticness. But the pre-Saturday Night Fever dance underground was actually sweetly earnest and irony-free in its hippie-dippie positivity, as evinced by anthems like M.F.S.B.'s "Love Is the Message." And the scene's combination of overwhelming sound, trippy lighting, and hallucinogens was indebted to the late-'60s psychedelic culture. Mancuso still uses the Timothy Leary catchphrase "set and setting" to describe the art of creating the right vibe at parties.

Part of the fascination for the Loft era is that it's about as far back as you can trace the roots of today's dance-and-drug culture. But it was actually another DJ—Nicky Siano, cofounder of the Gallery—who took the Loft's synergy between sound, lights, and drugs and turned it into a full-blown trance-dance science. "I had this brainstorm—no one was eating the free bananas, so we dissolved LSD in water, borrowed a syringe from a junkie friend, and injected the fruit," says Siano. Larry Levan, then learning DJ'ing under Siano's tutelage, was given the job of spiking the fruit punch. With much of the Gallery crowd buzzing on acid, "the vibe was electric; people were having seizures on the dancefloor," says Siano. Another popular substance was Quaaludes, which created a touchy-feely "love energy" similar to Ecstasy.

The New York dance underground described by Siano—clubs with house dealers, audiences hyped on a polydrug intake, trippy lights synchronized to a hypnotic beat, DJs working the crowd into mass hysteria—was essentially rave culture in chrysalis. More immediately, clubs like the Gallery inspired Studio 54, where Siano DJ'd for a few months. When disco went mainstream, the original scene bunkered down in the underground. The Paradise Garage, founded in 1976, was a members-only club with resident DJ Larry Levan playing to a mainly gay, black and Hispanic crowd. That same year Levan's friend Frankie Knuckles moved to Chicago to take up a residency at the Warehouse, transplanting the New York underground ethos and in the process fathering house music.

With the Paradise Garage era ending with the club's closure in 1987, and the Loft in difficulties, New York's dance underground survived into the '90s thanks to enclaves like Better Days, Tracks, Shelter, and the Sound Factory Bar. But at these clubs, the underground's sensibility became gradually more conservative. DJs venerated Mancuso and Levan (who died in 1992), but few emulated their openness to left-field artists like Jah Wobble and Holger Czukay, Nina Hagen, and Liquid Liquid. Instead, "garage" solidified as a genre term referring to soulful New York house characterized by organic textures, Latin percussion, and a jazzy feel. By the mid '90s, the city's dance culture was divided between the traditionalist house scene and the more future-leaning rave, which arrived here as an exotic U.K. import (but was actually a mutant form of Chicago house). On one side, white glow-stick warriors stoked on E rally to superstar DJs from Europe. On the other, it's Europeans who flock to worship at the shrine of all things authentically old school—the largely gay and black dance underground, where the DJs are local.

Since Twilo went wholesale into the Euro-trance sound, there's been a real divide in New York between drug clubs and what you could call soul clubs or 'vibe' clubs, like Body & Soul," says Adam Goldstone, a local DJ-producer who records for Nuphonic. Body & Soul—founded in 1996 by two veterans of the '70s underground, François Kevorkian and Danny Krivit, and their friend Joe Claussell—almost single-handedly sparked the renaissance of interest in New York's pre-disco club culture. Harking back to the approach of Mancuso and Levan, the trio DJ together round-robin style, and generally play tunes from start to finish rather than mixing. Echoing Mancuso and Levan, they believe the real art of DJ'ing is "programming"—the selection and sequencing of songs—a reaction against the cult of DJ virtuosity where jocks like Sasha and Digweed show off their seamless mixing by picking compatible samey-sounding tracks.

Another aspect that Body & Soul revived is the old-school ethos of playing healing, redemptive music. "Back in the day, the talented DJs really spun to tell a story with their records," says Krivit. "At Body & Soul, we are conscious that the music's talking, and you can't just play nonsense, or go to a song that contradicts the message in the previous song." Like the Loft, Body & Soul is dedicated, says Kevorkian, to "cherishing and perpetuating" a gay urban tradition that's over 30 years old and that survived both the disco backlash and the decimation of AIDS.

The party—hailed by U.K. dance magazines as the best club in the world—draws party animals and purist house scholars from Britain and Europe, immaculately retro-styled Japanese waifs, and bored New York hipsters who want a taste of what things were like "back in the day." "Dance music had become too technical, people were missing the soulfulness," says Richard Costecu, another member of the team behind the Maestro documentary. "That soulful house sound never went away; there were always people who lived for it. But maybe more people are ready for it now—they're sick of hearing disco loops all night long, they want 'real music.' And the new recruits are really interested in the history of the scene. It's still a more mature crowd at Body & Soul, not annoying suburban kids who are popping E's and want to hear fast music."

Not everybody is happy about the newcomers, though. "Some people say that the vibe at Body & Soul has deteriorated as the composition of the party has changed, and I'm one of them," says Fikentscher. "So I've looked for other parties that are more 'underground.' "

This is a vital contradiction running through house culture: The overt ideology is one of love, unity, and inclusivity, but in reality this is limited to insiders, "those in the know." "Body & Soul was initially a secret you passed only on to your best friends, just like the Loft and the Garage," says Fikentscher. "To this day, you see parties advertised that say, 'If you have a Paradise Garage membership pass from way back, you get in for free.' " The most positive spin on this exclusivity is to see it as tribal rather than elitist. To maintain the right vibe, clubs need to control access. But even the best-kept secret can't stay on the down-low for long, and clubs have an in-built mortality. By the time they've established a killer vibe, it's only a matter of time before outsiders arrive to alienate the "true believers." Hence the post-Body & Soul rash of small underground nights like Bang the Party, Journey, Together in Spirit (like Body & Soul, a Sunday-afternoon party), and Deep See, an after-work club DJ'd by veterans like Andre Collins and sometimes kicked off by Kai Fikentscher's irregular series of lectures on the history of house.

Clubs like these are glorious proof that New York's disco-house tradition is a living thing. But there's a downside: The keep-the-faith attitude often translates into a kind of cultural protectionism (typified by the snobbish disdain of most New York house purists toward 2step, London's radical twist on garage). Worse, the excessive sense of heritage ensures that the scene evolves very slowly. In truth, New York dance culture hasn't delivered the shock-of-the-new in well over a decade. Despite the rhetoric of open-mindedness and eclecticism, the fusions that occur—Afro-Beat, Brazilian music, the lighter side of electric jazz—are rather predictable, and hidebound by the scene's premium on old-fashioned notions of "musicality" and "soulfulness." The underground's refusal to break with the past has effectively denied it the musical breakthroughs that have occurred in other cities: Detroit, Sheffield, Ghent, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, Berlin, and, repeatedly, London. There's a fine line between honoring the past and living there. The solution? A little less reverence, maybe.