Meet the unsung heroes of New York’s house music history (DJ Mag)

House music’s Chicago origins should be well known to everyone by now: it was born in the early 1980s in clubs frequented by the city’s queer people of colour, midwifed by DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, and raised by producers like Marshall Jefferson, Jesse Saunders and Farley “Jackmaster” Funk. But the synthesised four-to-the-floor rhythms of what we now know as house percolated elsewhere as well — it just took a little longer. There weren’t many places where this music bubbled with more vigour than New York City — by around the late ’80s and certainly by the early ’90s, it had become the dominant sound of the city’s dance clubs.

House music’s rise in the New York area is often told through its superstar DJs and producers — Todd Terry, David Morales, Tony Humphries, Louie Vega et al — but they weren’t the only figures who played a significant role. There are plenty of equally vital but perhaps lesser-known contributors — people like Tedd Patterson, for example. Though he entered the picture relatively late in the sound’s ascent — he moved to New York from Atlanta in 1991 — he’s a prime example of the kind of person who, while toiling in the scene’s trenches, contributed to house’s NYC ascent.

When DJ Mag catches up with Patterson at his upstate New York home in the riverside town of Hudson, he’s sitting in front of the coveted promo poster for Grace Jones’s rendition of ‘Love Is The Drug’, designed by Jean-Paul Goude. “When I would go to Frankie’s apartment, I’d try to talk it off the wall: ‘You sure you want that? It doesn’t look right in here’,” he casually recalls — the Frankie in question, of course, being the late Frankie Knuckles. (Patterson ended up sourcing his own copy of the poster.) Patterson and Knuckles were good friends; along with CJ Mackintosh, Knuckles’ long-time production partner Eric Kupper, and others, he played at Frankie Knuckles’ 70th birthday celebration in London’s fabric on 25th January.

Coming up in the US state of Georgia, it was hardly a given that Patterson would be close with the likes of Knuckles, or be a key participant in the house music world at all. He was born and raised in Savannah, and as soon as he was old enough, he was “one of those barflies that was always at a club Monday through Sunday.”

In 1979, he began DJing at one of the city’s few gay bars; by 1982, he’d moved to Atlanta and managed to score a gig at a club called Weekends, spinning what used to be called “new music” — Section 25, New Order, Nitzer Ebb and the like — along with hip-hop, go-go and more. That ‘more’, within a few years, came to include Chicago house music, and by a bit later in the decade, he was helming a house-centric night at a club called Colorbox.

He’d also become a Billboard reporter, providing feedback to the then-influential trade magazine for its charts. Between that and his DJing, he had enough juice to make the move to NYC in 1991. “I had become friends with a lot of record promoters,” Patterson says, “and two of those people were Josh DeRienzis and David Chang. They were just starting Emotive.”

Emotive was about to become one of the great New York house labels of the early ’90s — another influential yet underrated New York house community member, Hector Romero, served time there as well — but it wasn’t exactly glamorous. “The Emotive office was about 10 feet long and eight feet wide,” he says. “One wall was record storage, and there were two desks, and I had a table. When I first walked in, [the DJ and producer] Charles Dockins was licking the packages to mail out his record, ‘We Can Do It’. Basically, I ended up doing that job.”

Patterson is usually credited with doing A&R for Emotive, but to hear him tell it, he was officially working promotions and unofficially as the office gopher. Still, his musical tastes helped shape Emotive and its sub-labels — Goldtone, Playhouse and Thumpin! — and in the process, helped to lead the evolution of the New York house sound. As an example of how casual that process could be, he tells the quick tale of how the great David Morales remix of Michelle Ayers’ ‘Respect’, one of the label’s seminal tunes, came to fruition. “I just walked over to Def Mix and said, ‘David, you gotta remix this record!’ And, oh my God, that was so hot.” He runs down other scene-defining releases to come out in his time at the label.

“There was some Murk stuff, like their remix of Karen Pollard’s ‘You Can’t Touch Me (You Can’t Hurt Me)’. That was one of our favourite things that ever happened. There was ‘What Is House Musik?’ and ‘Plastic’ from DJ Pierre [as Phuture Scope]; Charles Dockins’ ‘We Can Do It (Wake Up)’; Charvoni’s ‘I’ll Be Right There’: we had a Roxy record [‘Chocolate & Peanut Butter’]. We had Davidson Ospina’s ‘Lifted’… there were so many. That’s good stuff, right?” Amazing stuff would be more like it.

Patterson parlayed the connections he’d made through Emotive into a career as a New York DJ. By 1993, just two years after arriving in NYC, he was spinning beyond the city limits; one of his earliest international dates was at no less than London’s Ministry Of Sound.

Well before Patterson hit the New York scene, starting in 1980, Bruce Forest was filling the dancefloor at Better Days, located at 49th Street between 8th and 9th Avenue. (Forest sits inexplicably under the radar in the scene’s history books despite a massively prolific career as a DJ, producer and remixer.) He’d take over for the beloved spinner Tee Scott in the club, and hoping to pave his own way rather than play in Scott’s shadow, he had soon set up a system of samplers, drum machines, triggers and keyboards — often played by David Cole, later of C + C Music Factory — to augment his sound. In effect, he was creating his own version of house music, before house was really even a thing. He was also playing recordings of music that later would be termed “proto-house.”

“At the end of ’81, I was given a cassette by Boyd Jarvis and Timmy [Regisford, another pair of key figures], and they didn’t have a name for it yet,” Forest says. “It was just this amazing bass groove. Eventually, it became a record called [Visual’s] ‘The Music Got Me’.” That track, now considered a classic of the not-quite-yet-house sound, was released on Prelude Records in 1983 — a few years before the first Chicago house tracks like Jesse Saunders ‘On & On’ and Chip-E’s ‘Time To Jack’.

A bit further downtown, Paradise Garage’s Larry Levan was crafting music that fit the proto-house template; his production work on songs like Peech Boys’ ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ would certainly have been termed ‘house’ had they been released a few years later. He was sprinkling that sound into his Garage sets, and by the time the Chicago floodgates began to open, he also incorporated those tunes. 

When the famed club closed its doors in September 1987, there was a void, one filled — in part — by parties like Wild Pitch. Founded by Greg Daye, the original line-up included David Camacho, Nick Jones, and Bobby Konders, and before long, a rotation of New York all-stars were joining in — DJ Disciple, Victor Rosado, Kim Lightfoot, Kenny Carpenter and Timmy Richardson among them. Richardson, also known as TOT (as in “the other Timmy”, to distinguish him from Timmy Regisford), recalls a Wild Pitch night held at 622 Broadway in Manhattan, now a Best Buy electronics shop but then a dance studio. “It was phenomenal — 600 in the hip-hop room and another 1000 in the back,” he recalls. “Yeah, it was pretty crazy.”

Parties like Wild Pitch and the similarly-inclined House Nation were pivotal to the rise of NYC house, but few individuals shaped the city’s club scene during that post-Garage era as profoundly as Christina Visca, who’d been active in New York nightlife since her days attending the Fashion Institute of Technology in the early ’80s. She was also a Paradise Garage acolyte. “I don’t think I missed a weekend at the Garage” she says. “I’ll think it was Keith Haring who said, ‘On a Saturday night, if you’re not sick or out of town, you’re at the Garage’. It wasn’t like, ‘You going out this week?’ You were just there. And could go alone because 1000 friends were there!”

It was there that Visca met a young hairdresser and budding DJ called Junior Vasquez. After the Garage closed, she quickly organised a night at a spot they dubbed The Space, with Vasquez on the decks. Quickly outgrowing The Space, they started Bassline; again outgrowing that, the pair, along with Phil Smith, launched Sound Factory in July of 1988.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the spot changed the face of New York nightlife. “Let’s start with the Sound Factory space itself,” she enthuses. “I mean, it was an incredible room — 12,000 square feet, that ramp leading to the dance floor, the stairs along the whole exit walk on 27th street where you could sit or stand, the flow around the dancefloor, the high ceilings, the lounge… I could go on and on. And let’s not forgot that monster sound system! And anyone who followed Junior throughout the years knows how he took house music and morphed it into his own unique sound.” Add a famously eclectic crowd, including core members of ballroom / voguing universe — “a high concentration of the Xtravaganzas,” as she puts it — and you have yourself a legend.

Meanwhile, 20 miles to the west, a scene had been growing in New Jersey, primarily due to the Zanzibar club in Newark, where Tony Humphries had an iconic residency. In nearby East Orange, a young skater named Abigail Adams had opened a roller skate shop called Movin’ in 1980. By later in the decade, it had morphed into a record store, and in 1987, Adams launched the Movin’ Records label with the release of ‘I’ve Got The Music’, credited to Before The Storm (featuring Boyd Jarvis).

Movin’ was arguably the NYC area’s first full-on, real-deal house label. “I didn’t really think that Movin’ was going to be a label — but once I did, the gates were open,” she says. It was quickly followed by Park Avenue’s ‘Don’t Turn Your Love’, produced by Smack Music, and Phase II’s ‘Reachin’, the Blaze crew’s second-ever production. Records like that would set the stage for a string of bona fide classic cuts, lasting from the rest of the ’80s till the mid-’90s. “I never really went with the intent on doing a label,” Adams claims, “but it all just kind of morphed into another record and another record and another record. It all happened so organically.”

Movin’ might have been one of the first NYC area house labels of that era, but it was far from the last. The biggest of the bunch in those days was Strictly Rhythm, with Gladys Pizarro, a Zanzibar devotee, serving as its A&R person throughout its golden years, minus a one-year stint at Strictly’s main competitor, Nervous. The label’s first release was Tylon’s nearly forgotten ‘Feel The Rhythm Of House’ — but the seventh release, ‘The Warning’ EP by Logic (AKA Wayne Gardiner and Eddie Maduro), put it on the map. Pizarro had brought the record to Tony Humphries at Zanzibar, who played it twice that night; he also gave it a spin on his Kiss FM mix show.

“And by the time I went to work on Monday, Mark [Finkelstein, Strictly’s owner] was getting phone calls from overseas from labels that wanted the license,” Pizarro says, still sounding amazed. “That was the real beginning of Strictly Rhythm, all due to Mr Humphries. I owe him so much to this day because if he hadn’t played that record… Not only did he give me a chance of a lifetime, but now I could create a domino effect, finding new and upcoming producers and DJs, because of him pushing that first domino.”

For many New Yorkers, it just wasn’t labels like Movin’, Strictly Rhythm or Nervous that heralded the arrival of house as the pre-eminent sound of New York dance clubs — it was the 1989 return of Frankie Knuckles, who was born and raised in The Bronx and came of clubbing age in spots like David Mancuso’s Loft and Nicky Siano’s Gallery before moving to Chicago in 1977 to make his name. Knuckles was brought back as a resident at The World, a club located in a charmingly (or perhaps frighteningly) dilapidated building on the far fringes of East Second Street. Steve Lewis was the director of the club, which previous to Knuckles had hosted a potpourri of musical styles.

“I didn’t know who Frankie was,” Lewis claims. “We had the idea he was good. But Frankie came from nowhere, as far as I knew. I was assigned to get him an apartment, so I got him a place right near the Hell’s Angels headquarters because I thought someone with a name like Frankie Knuckles would be a short, fat white guy with hairy knuckles. I picked him up at the airport, and it was decidedly not that guy! It was embarrassing.”

He might be kidding; Lewis is something of a raconteur to this day. But there’s little denying that Knuckles’ residency — along with that of David Morales, who signed on to The World at around the same time — helped cement house music’s supremacy. “Frankie was able to immediately become part of the scene,” Lewis says. “We really knew house was happening. We knew it was going to stay.”

And then there’s Patterson himself, who’s currently immersed in what could be considered a late-career renaissance. He’s spinning constantly, as a regular at the New York throwdown Battle Hymn, internationally for the Defected label’s extended family of parties and festivals, and beyond. (As this interview took place, he was about to jet off to a gig in Italy.) He’s putting more energy than ever into producing — a Patterson version of Meshell Ndegeocello’s ‘Love’ was released last autumn, while a remix of the Cevin Fisher classic ‘The Freaks Come Out’ is due out soon. And four and a half decades after his DJing debut, he’s finally gearing up to release his debut album, featuring collaborations with the likes of revered vocalists Joi Cardwell and Inaya Daye, along with relative new-schoolers like The Illustrious Blacks.

“I just want to be involved in my community,” he says. “I want to put something in and I want to be appreciated for being in the game. I love the idea that this 4/4 thump does not go away and just keeps regenerating and rediscovering itself.”

The legacy continues; the beat goes on, and on and on and on.